\ 




Class_:?R4^3i 
Book ^^ _ 



Copght}»J° 



901 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSti; 




THOMAS CARLYLE. 
From a photograph. 



lingltsti Classics — ^tar Series 

/ 

CARLYLE'S 
ESSAY ON BURNS 



EDITED FOR SCHOOL USE 
BY 

WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, A.M. 

INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 







GLOBE SCHOOL BOOK COMPANY 

NEW YORK AND CHICAGO 



M 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Cores Received 

MAR. 25 1901 

Copyright entry 

CLASS O/XXc. N». 

COPY B. 



. : \ 



Copyright, 1901, by 
Globe School Book Company. 

M. p. 1. 



• • * • • * * 



•- c , c f 



MANHATTAN PRESS 

474 WEST BROADWAY 

NEW YORK 



PREFACE 

The immediate object of this edition of Carlyle's Essay 
on Burns is to lay before the student of the college pre- 
paratory school the text of the admirable essay, accom- 
panied by such notes and explanations as shall make clear 
to him its meaning as a whole and in detail, and its relation 
to the life and work of the author. There is, of course, no 
attempt to make the treatment exhaustive. The more im- 
portant aim is to render more accessible and hence more 
interesting, in the best sense of the word, a very small 
portion of the work of two of the worthiest figures in 
English literature. In pursuing such an end the editor's 
duty clearly is to allow his subjects as freely as possible 
to speak for themselves. This principle will be found to 
underlie the arrangement of this edition and to account for 
the presence, in an appendix, of certain of the poems of 
Burns. 

In preparing this edition, I have drawn from the authori- 
ties cited in the Bibliography at the end of the volume. 
I wish to express my obligation to former editors of this 
essay, especially to Mr. Wilson Farrand of Newark Acad- 
emy (Longmans, 1898) and Professor George E. Koyes of 
the University of Wisconsin (The Eiverside Press, 1896), 
without whose valuable notes the work would have been 
far more difiicult. 

W. T. B. 

Columbia University, 
January 22, 1901. 

iii 



INTRODUCTION 

THOMAS CAELYLE 

Thomas Carlyle was born December 4, 1795; more than 
eighty-five years later he died, February 4, 1881. The space 
of years covered by his life marks, more than that of almost 
any of his contemporaries, the great literary production of 
the nineteenth century. At the time of his birth, of the 
greater literary men of the eighteenth century, only Burns, 
Burke, Cowper, and Sheridan were living, and of these only 
the last survived into the next century. Three years after 
Carlyle's birth, the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of 
Wordsworth and Coleridge may be said, so far as the remark 
can be made of any one book, to have ushered in the new 
literary era ; both of these men Carlyle outlived by many 
years. The great poets, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, achieved 
fame and died while Carlyle was yet a young man, and the 
Waverley Novels began to appear only when he was nineteen. 
De Quincey, Lamb, and Landor produced nothing of moment 
before the beginning of the century, and the last and longest- 
lived of these Carlyle survived by seventeen years. The 
lives of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Macaulay, and 
John Stuart Mill are comprehended within the span of his 
life. By the time of his death, too, he had seen the flower 
of the great names who outlived him; by 1881, the best 
poetry of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold had been writ- 
ten; in prose, Newman, Arnold and Ruskin, Freeman, 
Froude and JLecky, Darwin and Spencer, had done the 
work on which their fame will rest. Of American authors 
of the same period, Irving and Cooper were writing while 




viii INTRODUCTION 

Carlyle was struggling in Edinburgh and Craigenputtock ; 
Prescott, Poe, and Hawthorne are compassed in the period 
of his life, and Emerson and Longfellow died only one year 
later than he. The story of his own life is the tale of years 
of struggle, of growing and final recognition as a man of 
letters with an influence second to that of none of his 
contemporaries. 

The place of Carlyle's birth was Ecclefechan, near Annan- 
dale in Dumfriesshire, the county of Scotland where Burns 
had passed his last years. Carlyle's parents, like those of the 
poet, though descended through a long ancestry, were poor. 
James Carlyle, the father, was by occupation a mason, at 
which he sometimes made a hundred pounds a year ; in char- 
acter he was not unlike William Burness. The mother was 
Margaret Aitken, and Thomas Carlyle was the eldest of nine 
children. Like the parents of Burns, the elder Carlyles were 
people of integrity and piety ; they watched over their chil- 
dren with exceeding devotion, and gave them all the education 
in their power. Carlyle, who early displayed his uncommon 
ability, was sent to the schools in the neighborhood, and by 
the age of thirteen was ready to enter Edinburgh University. 
He was intended by his parents for the ministry in the Scotch 
Church, but while at Edinburgh was apparently so assailed 
with religious doubts as to make the step impossible. Dur- 
ing a few years after leaving the University, he taught 
school, first at Annan Academy as tutor in mathematics, 
and later at Kirkcaldy, where he made the acquaintance of 
Edward Irving, one of his warmest friends; Irving's library 
enabled Carlyle to gratify his love of reading and to mitigate 
the weariness which he felt at teaching. In October, 1818, 
however, teaching had become so distasteful to him that he 
resigned from his school, and went to Edinburgh to try to 
earn his living. 

The years at Edinburgh mark perhaps the lowest state in 
the life of Carlyle. He was tormented with dyspepsia and 



THOMAS CARLYLE IX 

was greatly depressed in spirit. Miserably poor, almost the 
only employment he had for a time was the writing of ency- 
clopedia articles. The condition of his mind at this time 
is best described by the ^^Everlasting No " of Sartor Resar- 
tus. Toward the middle of 1821, however, he seems by 
superb resolution and energy of will to have shaken off his 
despondency and determined to meet life sternly and with 
unflinching face. In attaining this new position he was 
greatly influenced by his reading of German, particularly of 
Goethe, the mystic Johann Paul Friedrich Eichter, and the 
philosopher Eichte. Ger inan literature was at that time 
his most absorbing study, and during the next decade he 
wrote many articles on the subject, of which his Life of 
Schiller and his translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are 
the most important. They brought him not so much money 
as some fame and the acquaintance of the great German 
poet. Carlyle, however, was in considerably better circum- 
stances ; from 1822-1824 he was tutor in a well-to-do family, 
the BuUers, from whom he received two hundred pounds a 
year for not uncongenial work. 

In 1826 Carlyle married Jane Baillie Welsh, a woman in 
many ways as remarkable as himself. For two years the 
couple lived near Edinburgh, where Carlyle wrote some 
articles for the Edinburgh Review, In 1828 Carlyle and 
his wife removed to Craigenputtock in Dumfriesshire, and 
it was here in the same year that he wrote his Essay on 
Burns for the Review. The place is more famous, however, 
as being the scene of the composition of the book which is 
perhaps most intimately associated with his name, the work 
which first springs into mind when Carlyle's name is men- 
tioned — Sartor Resartus. The book is so remarkable and 
so much a history of the intellectual and emotional life of 
the author that a word may be said about it. It is impossi- 
ble, of course, in the limits of the present space, to give more 
than the briefest account of the literary work of the author. 



INTRODUCTION 






Sartor Resartus purports to be a review by an English 
editor of a treatise by a learned German professor, Herr 
Teufelsdrockh, with whose life and opinions it deals. The 
doctrine of the book is the famous Philosophy of Clothes, • 
in the main symbolical of Carlyle's creed at the time — that 
as clothes express the taste of the wearer, so institutions, 
customs, and even moral life may be regarded as the vesture 
of the mind, to be changed and altered at its will. The most 
interesting yjart of the work is the account of the moral 
attire of Teufelsdrockh, who is Carlyle himself. It is the 
tale of early suffering, lack of sympathy from fellow-men, 
disappointment in the affairs both of the head and of the 
heart, despondency and despair over the great question why 
man is in the universe, doubt and wavering, and final accept- 
ance of the facts of existence with hope of solution through 
stern and persistent endeavor. It is in reality a prose epic 
of the inner life, the life, perhaps, though the ultimate 
solution may not be the same, of every young man of 
serious and thoughtful temperament who, in the years of 
expanding mind, has been troubled with the great ques- 
tions of human destiny. 

The publication of Sartor Eesartus was begun in Fraser^s 
Magazine in December, 1833, but the. opinions and the man- 
ner of writing raised a storm of protest among the sub- 
scribers to the periodical. The serial came to an end in 
August, 1834, and it was in America, in 1836, that it first 
appeared in book form. Meanwhile, in 1834, the Carlyles had 
removed to London, where they henceforth lived. The author 
was then about to begin another of the works which come to 
mind when his name is mentioned, The French RevolutioUy 
a series of striking and brilliant scenes and incidents from 
that most dramatic event. Begun in 1834, it was completed 
in 1837, and its success was more considerable than any that( 
had yet greeted Carlyle. He was enabled to obtain a hearing 
for several courses of lectures which he delivered in the two 



\ 



THOMAS CARLYLE xi 

or "three years following. One of these, On Heroes and 
Hero-Worship, published in 1841 in book form, is character- 
istic enough to demand a special word. ^ ^ 

With the ^possible exception of' Sart or and the French 
Revohitioj i, Heroes ^and . Herg ^Worshi^ is Carlyle's most 
widely read production. It is perhaps the clearest expres- 
sion of ^ his philosophy. Sartor, as we have seen, may be 
regarded as a prose epic of the inner life. The struggle 
dfS)ne, the p^int »f view attained, the principles fixed, we 
have in the later bj^ok the authf^r's view ^f the facts mi 
human progress. '^ As I take it,'' he says, '^ Universal 
History, the history of what man has accomplished in this 
world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who ha^ 
worked there." And, further on in the introduction, h^ 
states what is really the moral purpose of the book: "W^ 
cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, with- 
out gaining something by him. He is the living light-foun- 
tain, which it is good and pleasant to be near." Ag^in, 
speaking of the Her o as a Man of Letters, he gives us the 
purpose of all his own^wntTn^^^'^'^Thj^^ of a Book, is 

he not a Preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on 
this day or that, but to all men in all times and places ? " 
He considers the hero in six aspects, as Divinity, as Prophet, 
as Poet, as Priest, as Man of Letters, and as King, and 
under each he gives us, with impressive power and insight, " 
in some of the most penetrative passages of criticism, the 
characters of exemplary world heroes. His sketch of the 
hero in Burns, in the Hero as a Man of Letters, should be 
compared with the earlier essay which is the subject of 
this volume. 

Certainly the major part of the work of Carlyle after this 
book is an illustration of the principles of history there 
enunciated. Some quasi-political essays he wrote, as Chart- 
ism in 1839, Past and Present in 1843, and Latter Day 
Pamphlets in 1850, but chiefly he dealt with men as the 



xil INTRODUCTION 

great movers of history. Several of his reviews of the 
period, as well as of the earlier years, deal with men of 
letters, but, as we know from the Essay on Burns, what 
interested Carlyle was the life of the man as a human 
being struggling in the world and conquering his destiny, 
rather than his mere literary product. After Heroes and 
Hero- Worship, Carlyle had little to say about men of letters 
pure and simple. In 1845 appeared his Cromiuell, over 
which he had toiled for several years ; in 1851 the life of 
his friend John Sterling, a man who, like Arthur Hallam, is 
chiefly remembered through his friendship with a greater 
man ; and in the same year was projected the vastest of 
all his undertakings, T/^e History of Frederick II. Over 
this work he labored thirteen years, the final volumes ap- 
pearing in 1865, and into them he put his best thought and 
energy. Frederick is the center of the picture, the master 
of the show, but the picture is the panorama of the state 
of Europe during the time of the great king, for the 
completeness and perfection of which Carlyle left no stone 
unturned. 

Frederick marks the climax of Carlyle's life. It won 
him in England recognition as the foremost of prose writers, 
and in Germany, too, his fame grew naturally great. Even 
the people of his native Scotland were conquered of their 
opposition to him and he was elected Lord Rector of the 
University of Edinburgh. Testimony of an affecting sort 
came the following year on the sudden death of Mrs. 
Carlyle ; even the Queen added her message of condolence. 
The year marks the beginning of his decline. He was 
seventy years of age, and the labor of Frederick had left 
him worn and weary. A few travels and some books 
mark this latter period ; of his books The Early Kings of 
JSforivay, 1775, is the most important. There was given to 
the public by his literary executor, Eroude, shortly after 
his decease, his Beminiscences of Jane Carlyle and of Jeffrey 



"^v THOMAS CARLYLE xiii 

and Edwa rd Irving , in the writing of which he had found 
solace in the months following the death of his wife. 

The position of Garlyle as a man of letters is second to 
that of none of the great prose writers who have influenced 
men in this century. His influence, however, like that of 
Samuel Johnson in the preceding century, is the personal 
influence of the powerful and upright man rather than that 
of the philosopher or the discoverer of new truth. His in- 
tegrity, his independence, his earnestness, his vitality, his 
matchless vigor, — these are the qualities which count m 
him ; for they are a part of his character as well as of his 
style. He was the sincerest of men, a stern hater of sham, 
cant, and affectation. As a system, his work, as his critics 
say, is unscientific and often untrue ; like the younger enthu- 
siast,^ JohiiRuskin, he could see little good in the laborious, 
systematic, thorough teachings of modern science; J^hough 
men like Darwin and Spencer have perhaps done most to 
determine the basal facts of life. Garlyle is rather, then, to be 
judged as the seer, the prophet, the preacher, who feels deeply 
the meaning of life, and exhorts his readers to feel rightly 
and to live rightly, to ^' do the duty which lies next you,'' 
to " work and despair not.'' Garlyle often appeared morose, 
surly, ungrateful to his benefactors, impatient of censure 
or criticism, at times querulous, but whatever disagreeable 
traits were his came from a man confident in his own in- 
tegrity, speaking from the fullness of his Ijieart. Sincerity 
isjjie ^eynote of his character ,as is vigor of his style. He 
felt that he had a word to say "to tne world, he spoke his 
message fearlessly and unswervingly, and, in the end, never 
seeking for popular favor, compelled the world to accept 
him. 

A word may be added with regard to the particular essay 
which is the subject of this volume. It is possibly the best 
point at which to begin the study of Garlyle. The qualities 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

of the essay, its warmth of feeling, its sincerity of purpose, 
its deep humanity, are those of Carlyle at all times. Pas- 
sages like paragraph 39 (p. 36) are thoroughly typical of his 
views of life ; they are to be compared with the struggle of 
Teufelsdrockh in^ Sartor Resartus. The subject, too, is one 
for which Carlyle must have had the utmost sympathy ; 
he and the poet Burns, had the two men been contem- 
porary, would have been near neighbors, and the land 
of Burns was nearly as familiar to the essayist as to Burns 
himself. A not unnoticeable similarity in the character of 
their parents and their training has already been pointed 
out. In a worldly sense, the advantage lay with the later 
man, slightly ; but, though Carlyle's path in the world led 
to success and Burns's to failure, Carlyle had that perfect 
understanding of the poet which is necessar}^ to good criti- 
cism. Burns has no juster or more sy^mpathetic advocate. 

Furthermore, the Essay on Burns is a good starting-point 
for the study of Carlyle, because, though characteristic 
of the author, it represents his earlier and less abnormal 
manner of writing. Crowded though it is with allusion, 
interrogation, and brilliant figure, it is clearer and more 
orderly in point of syntax tljan the later works. Compared 
with^xSar^ or Resartus 'and Heroes and Hero- War sMj}^ there 
are to be found in it few of the inversions, the twists, the 
figures becoming symbols, the intense emphasis. Like the 
later work, it may possibly be regarded as technically loose 
in structure; the point need not be elaborated, since no 
one can have difficulty in seeing what Carlyle is driving 
at or in gaining a strong and lasting impression. 



^xV 




ROBERT BURNS. 
After the painting by Alexander Nasmyth. 



NOTE ON THE LIFE OF BURNS XV 



NOTE ON THE LIFE OF BUENS 

(The following paragraphs are intended merely to state the chief 
facts in the life of Burns to which Carlyle makes reference and to 
form a very general sketch of his life. ) 

E/OBERT Burns was born on the 25th of January, 1759, at 
Alloway, a small village some two miles south of the town of 
Ayr on the west coast of Scotland. His father was William 
Barnes or Burness, a gardener and farmer by occupation, 
of the-^easant class, but with a long ancestry ; his mother 
was Alice Broun or Brown, a woman of about the same 
rank as hek husband. Both were people of the best Scotch 
peasant type, sturdy, intelligent, and God-fearing, though 
the father was perhaps the more extraordinary of the two ; 
of him Burns has left a loving picture in The Cotter^s Satur- 
day Night. The place of the poet's birth was a small hut 
of clay and thatch, which his father had built on the farm 
of seven acres ; it was here that Burns spent the first 
seven years of his life. At that time William Burnes 
removed to a better farm at Mount Oliphant, about two 
miles distant, and here the family lived till the poet was in 
his eighteenth year. 

It was while living on these two farms on the outskirts 
of Ayr that the poet gained all the education of a systematic 
sort that he ever had. His father, with an enlightenment 
unusual even among Scotch peasants, gave his children the 
best schooling in his power. By his fifteenth year Burns, 
though compelled by the poverty of his parents to do the 
work of a grown man on the farm, had acquired a very 
unusual command of the English language, knew consider- 
able French, and had a smattering of Latin, learned in the 
seasons when farm work was least pressing. His tutor, 
John Murdoch, also lent him books from his own rather 
scant library, and Burns, at this time, had done an unusual 



xvi INTRODUCTION 

amount of reading for a boy of his age. The same year of 
his life is marked by his first extant jjoem, Handsoine Nell, 
in honor of a peasant girl a year younger than himself, his 
partner in the harvesting. This poem is the first recorded 
expression of the poet of the susceptibility of temperament 
which was one of his marked traits of character and is so 
frequently to be found in his songs. 

In 1777 William Burness removed from the farm at 
Mount Oliphant to a larger and better one, Lochlea, in the 
parish of Tarbolton, some five miles northeast of Ayr. The 
cause of his change was the fact that, on the death of the 
owner of the Mount Oliphant farm, the overseer became so 
oppressive that it was only by the closest economy that the 
family of Burns was able to maintain itself, and hence did 
not renew the lease. At Lochlea, William Burns hoped to 
experience better times, and indeed did for a few -years 
seem to be more fortunate. He, however, became involved 
with his landlord in disputes over his lease ; a long series 
of lawsuits used up his money ; and finally, broken in 
health from his long life of toil, he died, in February, 1784. 
Foreseeing the outcome of their father's suit, Eobert Burns 
and his brother Gilbert had previously taken a farm two or 
three miles away, at Mossgiel, in the parish of Mauchline, 
and hither the family, on the death of the father, took its 
way. 

At Lochlea, Burns composed comparatively little poetry; 
of the poems named or alluded to by Carlyle only the Poor 
Mailie^s Elegy was written here, but the stay at Lochlea was 
distinguished by one of his best-known lyrics. To Mary Mqx[ ~ 
son^ It was during this period that Burns made his visit to 
Irvine mentioned on page 38. Irvine was a small seaport 
eleven miles to the north of Ayr and rather nearer Lochlea ; 
the distance is mentioned, as in former instances, merely to' 
show the smallness of the region in which the poet's life ha(J: 
been lived. It was in the winter of 1781-1782 that Burns 




OTE ON THE LIFE OE BURNS xvii 

..^^ i\ F . \ 

made tile trip. Wishing to establish himself more inde- 
pendently and felicitously in the world, he went to Irvine 
and there engaged in flax-growing, in partnership with a man 
named Peacock, a distant relative of his mother's. The 
business did not prosper ; on New Year's night, while Burns 
and his partner were carousing, their shop burned to the 
ground and left them penniless. Burns, too, fell in with a set 
of wayfaring men and smugglers at this seaport town who 
were apparently of less austere life than he had been accus- 
tomed to in thft interior of the country. He was, moreover, 
seized with Wglg^iicholy^vhich left a deep impression on him 
and tormented him with thoughts of death ; nor even after 
his return to Lochlea in 1782 did he regain his tranquillity. 
The period of Burns's residence at Mossgiel is the most 
important in his life. It was here between 1784 and 1786 
that he wrote the most famous of his poems, among them 
The Cotter^s Saturday Night, Hallowe^en, Hie Jolly Beggars, 
The Brigs of Ayr, To a Mouse, The Vision, A Winter Night, 
Scotch Drink, To a Mountain Daisy, and the best known of 
his satires. The Holy Fair, Holy Willie'' s Prayer, An Address 
to the DeHl, and others. A word with regard to the situa- 
tion of the poet and the occasion of his satires may be 
interesting. The town of Mauchline, of about a thousand 
inhabitants, was, like the rest of the region, torn with 
religious discussion.- There were two theological parties 
among the clergy, the so-called "Auld Lights" and 
^* New Lights." The former represented the old rigid 
Calvinistic faith and judged without, mercy or charity those 
who were not so positive and dogmatic as themselves. Their 
opponents, the ^^New Lights," were far more liberal, be- 
lieved less in predestination, took a more charitable and 
common-sense view of things ; and to them Burns was by 
temperament inclined. The immediate cause of the poet's 
satires was, however, the persecution which his friend and 
landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a ^^ writer," suffered from the 



XVlll INTRODUCTION 

tongues of the ^^ Old Lights.'' The reader must imagine that 
in so small a town as Mauchline, where Burns was probably 
personally known to every inhabitant and where the feud 
waxed warm, his stirring verses would have had a pretty 
general currency, whether for favor or disapproval. It is 
certain that he was looked upon by the New Light clergy as 
their champion, though his satire was in itself often enough 
very irreverent. 

But meanwhile the farm did not prosper. Early in 178G, 
Burns, disgusted with his ill fortune and almost desperate, 
determined to flee Scotland to begin life afresh in the New 
World. He had actually engaged passage for Jamaica, where 
a place on a plantation at thirty pounds a year, a considerably 
larger sum than he had ever had for a year's service in Scot- 
land, was open to him. Through the influence of his friend 
Hamilton, however, he determined to help pay for the ex- 
penses of his passage by putting together enough of his poems 
to furnish a volume. He obtained three hundred and fifty 
subscribers in advance, and had an edition of six hundred 
printed. This event was the turning-point in his career. 
Through the "favorable reception of the volume at Edinburgh, 
and particularly through the encouragement of Dr. Blacklock, 
Burns determined to go to the capital of Scotland, where, in 
Carlyle's phrase, he " came on the world as a prodigy." 

For convenience, a second period of Burns's life may be 
regarded as beginning with this journey to Edinburgh. Up to 
this event he " had found himself in the deepest obscurity." 
From now on he became, as it were, a public character. For 
about two years he lived at intervals in the capital, where the 
second edition of his poems, liberally subscribed to by the 
gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, placed him in unwonted 
fortune — he received about six hundred pounds as proceeds 
— and enabled him to make several tours about Scotland. In 
1788 he gave up Edinburgh for good, and leased a farm, Ellis- 
land, at Dalswinton in Dumfriesshire, whither tourists came 



I 



K 




ROBERT BURNS. 
Profile taken in Edinburgrh in 1787. 



NOTE ON THE LIFE OF BURNS XIX 

to visit him. At about this time also he was through the in- 
fluence of his friends appointed excise commissioner. The 
duties of the excise man were the weighing of imported goods 
and domestic produce^ as liquors, of a dutiable nature, but the 
poet did not enter very actively into this work until the fail- 
ure of his farming scheme, after about three years, compelled 
him to seek other and surer means of livelihood, even though 
of so uncongenial a sort. In the latter part of 1791 he re- 
moved to Dumfries, a city in the extreme southwest of Scot- 
land. To this period of his life belong most of his famous 
'' Songs," as distinguished from his longer poems. 

At Dumfries Burns soon gained the distrust of the higher 
classes by his attitude with regard to the French Revolution. 
Though a patriotic Briton, he showed much sympathy for 
the struggle of the French people for their rights, and, 
though on the outbreak of war between England and France 
he joined a company of local volunteers, one or two Jests of 
his served to gain him the hatred of the conservative people, 
a circumstance to which Carlyle makes reference (page 50). 
At this time, too, the poet, though never a drunkard, was not 
so uniformly sober as in his earlier days. Toward the mid- 
dle of 1795 his health began to break down, and by the 
spring of the following year he was the prey of rheumatic 
fevers. He died on the 21st of July, 1796, in the thirty- 
eighth year of his age. 

Such are, in brief, the main events in the life of the poet. 
His life was short and, in appearance, not a happy one ; 
indeed, from a worldly point of view it was even miserable, 
for Burns was too great a poet to be a successful business 
man, too proud to be habitually dependent on patronage. 
It is worth while remembering, too, that his poems were for 
the most part "mere occasional effusions," sung to himself, 
for example, while following the plow or lying in wait for 
smugglers. Yet he was almost the only poet of the time to 
attain lasting elninence; the age was possibly, as Carlyle 



XX INTRODUa^ION 

says; ^^the most prosaic Britain had yet seen." Of the 
earlier poets, Collins died the year of Burns's birth and Gray 
when he was fifteen. Goldsmith and Johnson had at the 
time of their death, in 1774 and 1784, long been regarded 
as prose writers, and the other great writers of the period, as 
Gibbon and Burke, made no claim on poetry. Cowper and 
Blake were the only poets who can be called contemporaries 
of Burns ; for Wordsworth and Coleridge did not initiate the 
great new life of the nineteenth century until two years after 
the death of Burns. The work of the Scotch poet is origi- 
nal in time, place, and circumstance. 




ROBERT BURNS. 
After the drawing by Archibald Skirving. 



/ 






BURNS 1 

1. In the modern arrangements of society, it is no un- 
common tiling that a man of genius must, like Butler, 
" ask for bread and receive a stone ; '' for, in spite of our 
grand maxim of supply and demand, it is by no means the 

5 highest excellence that men are most forward to recognise. 

-^^The inventor of a spinning-jenny is pretty sure of his re- 
ward in his own day ; but the writer of a true poem, like the "7 
apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary. 
We do not know whether it is not an aggravation of the 

10 injustice, that there is generally a posthumous retribution. 
Eobert Burns, in the course of Kature, might yet have 
been living ; but his short life was spent in toil and penury ; 
and he died, in the prime of his manhood, miserable and 
neglected : and yet already a brave mausoleum shines over 

15 his dust, and more than one splendid monument has been 
reared in other places to his fame ; the street where he lan- 
guished in poverty is called by his name ; the highest per- 
sonages in our literature have been proud to appear as his 
commentators and admirers ; and here is the sixth narra- 

20 tive of his Life that has been given to the world ! 

2. Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologise for 
\this new attempt on such a subject : but his readers, we 

believe, will readily acquit him ; or, at worst, will censure 
only the performance of his task, not the choice of it. 
25 The character of Burns, indeed, is a theme that cannot 
easily become either trite or exhausted ; and will probably 
gain rather than lose in its dimensions by the distance to 

'^Edinburgh Review, No. 96. — The Life of Robert Burns. By J. G. 
Lockhart, LL.B. Edinburgh, 1828. 

1 



2 CAKLYLEVS ESSAY ON BURNS 

wliicli it is removed by Time. yNo man, it has been said, 
is a hero to his valet ; and this is probably true ; but the 

30 fault is at least as likely to be the valet's as the hero's. ( Ji 
For it is certa in, tlxa t to the vulgar eye few thin^o^s ar e 
wonderful that are not distant. It is difficult for men to 
believe thanhe man, tiie mere man whom they see, nay 
perhaps painfully feel, toiling at their side through the 

35 poor jostlings of existence, can be made of finer clay than 
themselves. Suppose that some dining acquaintance of 
Sir Th omas Luc y's, a nd neighbour of John a Combe's, had 
snatched an hour or two from the preservation of his game, 
and written us a Life of Shakespeare ! What dissertations 

40 should we not have had, — not on Hamlet and The Tern- 
2)est, but on the wool-trade, and deer-stealing, and the 
libel and vagrant laws ; and how the Poacher became a 
Player; and how Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Chris- 
tian bowels, and did not push him to extremities ! In like 

45 manner, we believe, with respect to Burns, that till the 
companions of his pilgrimage, the Honourable Excise Com- 
missioners, and the Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, 
and the Dumfries Aristocracy, and all the Squires and 
Earls, equally with the Ayr Writers, and the New and Old 

50 Light Clergy, whom he had to do with, shall have become 
invisible in the darkness of the Past, or visible only by 
light borrowed from his juxtaposition, it will be difficult 
to measure him by any true standard, or to estimate what 
he really was and did, in the eighteenth century, for his 

55 country and the world. It will be difficult, we say ; but 
still a fair problem for literary historians ; and repeated 
attempts will give us repeated approximations. 

3. His former Biographers have done something, no 
doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. ^Dr. 

60 Currie and Mr. Walker, the principal of these writers, 
have both, we think, mistaken one essentially important 
thino' : Their own and the world's true relation to their 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 3 

author, and the style in which it became such men to 
think and to speak of such a mairr > Dr. Currie loved the 

65 poet truly ; more perhaps than he avowed to his readers, or 
even to himself ; yet he everywhere introduces him with a 
certain patronising, apologetic air ; as if the polite public 
might think it strange and half unwarrantable that he, 
a man of science, a scholar and gentleman, should do such 

70 honour to a rustic. In all this, however, we readily admit 
that his fault was not want of love, but weakness of 
faith ; and regret that the first and kindest of all our poet's 
biographers should not have seen farther, or believed more 
boldly what he saw. Mr. Walker offends more deeply in 

75 the same kind : and both err alike in presenting us with a 
detached catalogue of his several supposed attributes, vir- 
tues and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting 
character as a living unity. This, however, is not paint- 
ing a portrait; but gauging the length and breadth of 

80 the several features, and jotting down their dimensions in 
arithmetical ciphers. Nay it is not so much as that: for 
we are yet to learn by what arts or instruments the mind 
could be so measured and gauged. 

4. Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both 

85 these errors>) He uniformly treats Burns as the high and 
remarkable man the public voice has now pronounced him 
to be : and in delineating him, he has avoided the method 
of separate generalities, and rather sought for character- 
istic incidents, habits, actions, sayings ; in a word, for as- 

90 pects which exhibit the whole man, as he looked and lived 
among his fellows. The book accordingly, with all its 
deficiencies, gives more insight, we think, into the true 
character of Burns, than any prior biography : though, 
being written on the very popular and condensed scheme of 

95 an article for Constable^ s Miscellany it has less depth than 
we could have wished and expected from a writer of such 
power ; and contains rather more, and more multifarious 




CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

qiiota%roiis than belong of right to an original production. 
Indeed, Mr. Lockhart's own writing is generally so good, 

100 so clear, direct and nervons, thut we seldom wish to see 
it making place for another man's. However, the spirit 
of the work is throughout candid, tolerant and anxiously 
conciliating; compliments and praises are liberally distrib- 
uted, on all hands, to great and small ; and, as Mr. Morris 

105 Birkbeck observes of the society in the backwoods of Amer- 
ica, " the courtesies of polite life are never lost sight of for 
a moment." But there are better things than these in the 
volume ; and we can safely testify, not only that it is easily 
and pleasantly read a first time, but may even be without 

110 difficulty read again. 

5. Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the prob- 
lem of Burns's Biography has yet been adequately solved. 
We do not allude so much to deficiency of facts or docu- 
ments, — though of these we are still every day receiving 

115 some fresh accession, — as to the limited and imperfect 
application of them to the great end of Biography. lOur 
notions upon this subject may perhaps appear extravagant; 
butG? an individual is really of consequence enough to have 
his me and character recorded for public remembrance, wc- 

120 have always been of opinion that the public ought to be 

3 made acquainted with all the inward springs and relations 
of his characterj How did the world and man's life, from 
his particular position, represent themselves to his mind ? 
How did coexisting circumstances modify him from with- 

125 out ; how did he modify these from within ? With what 
endeavours and what efficacy rule over them ; with what 
resistance and what suffering sink under them ? In one 
word, what and how produced was the effect of society on 
him ; what and how produced was his effect o^ society ? 

130 He who should answer these questions, in regard to any 
individual, would, as we believe, furnish a model of per- 
fection in Biography. Few individuals, indeed, can de- 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 5 

serve such a study ; and many lives will be written, and, 
for the gratification of innocent curiosity, ought to be 

135 written, and read and forgotten, which are not in this 
sense biographies. But Burns, if we mistake not, is one 
of these few individuals; and such a study, at least with 
such a result, he has not yet obtained. Our own contribu- 
tions to it, we are aware, can be but scanty and feeble; but 

140 we offer them with good-will, and trust they may meet 
with acceptance from those they are intended for. 



..1,1-t 



6. Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy ; and 
was, in that character, entertained by it, in the usual fashion, 
with loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, speedily subsiding 
. 145 into censure and neglect ; till his early and most mournful 
death again awakened an enthusiasm for him, which, espe- 
cially as there was now nothing to be done, and much to be 
spoken, has prolonged itself even to our own time. It is 
true, the " nine days *' have long since elapsed ; and the very 
^ 150 continuance of this clamour proves that Burns was no vulgar 
wonder. Accordingly, even in sober judgments, where, as 
years passed by, he has come to rest more and more exclus- 
ively on his own intrinsic merits, and may now be well-nigh 
shorn of that casual radiance, he appears not only as a true 

155 British poet, but as one of the most considerable British men 
of the eighteenth century. Let it not be objected that he 
did little. He did much, if we consider where and how. If 
the work performed was small, we must remember that he 
had his very materials to discover ; for the metal he worked 

160 in lay hid under the desert moor, where no eye but his had 
guessed its existence ; and we may almost say, that with his 
own hand he had to construct the tools for fashioning it. 
For he found himself in deepest obscurity, without help, 
without instructio]^ without model ; or with models only of 

165 the meanest soYtf~_An educated man stands, as it were, in 
the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine, filled with 



6 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

all the weapons and engines whicli man's skill has been able 

.^ to devise from the earliest time ; and he works, accordingly, 

with a strength borrowed from all past ages^| How dilfer- 

170 ent is his state who stands on the outside of TEat storehouse, 
and feels that its gates must be stormed, or remain forever 
shut against him ! His means are the commonest and rud- 
est; the mere work done is no measure of his strength. A 
dwarf behind his steam-engine may remove mountains ; but 

175 no dwarf will hew them down with a pickaxe ; and he must 
be a Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms. 

7. It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. 
Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, and 
in a condition the most disadvantageous, where his mind, if 

180 it accomplished aught, must accomplish it under the press- 
ure of continual bodily toil, nay, of penury and desponding 
apprehension of the worst evils, and with no furtherance 
but such knowledge as dwells in a poor man's hut, and the 
rhymes of a Ferguson or Eamsay for his standard of beauty, 

185 he ..inks not under all these impediments : through the fogs 
and darkness of that obscure region, his lynx eye discerns 
the true relations of the world and human life ; he grows 
into intellectual strength, and trains himself into intellect- 
ual expertness. Impelled by the expansive movement of his 

190 own irrepressible soul, he struggles forward into the general 
view; and with haughty modesty lays down before us, as 
the fruit of his labour, a gift, which Time has now pro- 
nounced imperishable. Add to all this, that his darksome 
drudging childhood and youth was by far the kindliest era 

195 of his whole life ; and that he died in his thirty-seventh 
year : and then ask. If it be strange that his poems are im- 
perfect, and of small extent, or that his genius attained no 
mastery in its art ? Alas, his Sun shone as through a tropi- 
cal tornado ; and the pale Shadow of Death eclipsed it at 

200 noon ! Shrouded in such baleful vapours, the genius of 
Burns was never seen in clear azure splendour, enlightening 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS T 

the world : but some beams from it did, by fits, pierce 
througli ; and it tinted those clouds with rainbow and orient 
colours, into a glory and stern grandeur, which men silently 

205 gazed on with wonder and tears ! 

8. We are anxious not to exaggerate ; for it is exposition 
rather than admiration that our readers require of us here ; 
and yet to avoid some tendency to that side is no easy mat- 
ter. We love Burns, and we pity him ; and love and pity 

210 are prone to magnify. Criticism, it is sometimes thought, 
should be a cold business ; we are not so sure of this ; but, 
at all events, our concern with Burns is not exclusively that 
of critics. True and genial as his poetry must appear, it is 
not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that he interests and 

215 affects us. He was often advised to write a tragedy : time 
and means were not lent him for this ; but through life he 
enacted a tragedy, and one of the deepest. We question 
whether the world has since witnessed so utterly sad a 
scene ; whether Napoleon himself, left to brawl with Sir 

220 Hudson Lowe, and perish on his rock, " amid the melan- 
choly main,'' presented to the reflecting mind such a " spec- 
tacle of pity and fear'' as did this intrinsically nobler, gentler 
and perhaps greater soul, wasting itself away in a hopeless 
struggle with base entanglements, which coiled closer and 

225 closer round him, till only death opened him an outlet. 
IConquerors are a class of men with whom, for most part, the 
world could well dispense ; nor can the hard intellect, tha., 
unsympathising loftiness and high but selfish enthusiasm * 
of such persons inspire us in general with any affection; at 

230 best it may excite amazement ; and their fall, like that of a 
pyramid, will be beheld with a certain sadness and awe. 
But a true Poet, a man in whose heart resides some effluence 
'oF^Wisdom, some tone of the '' Eternal Melodies,'^ is the 
most precious gift that can be bestowed on a generationj we 

235 see in him a freer, purer development of whatever is noblest 
in ourselves ; his life is a rich lesson to us ; and we mourn 



8 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

his death as that of a benefactor who loved and taught 
us. 

9. Such a gift had Nature, in her bounty, bestowed on us 

240 in Robert Burns ; but with queenlike indifference she cast 
it from her hand, like a thing of no moment ; and it was 
defaced and torn asunder, as an idle bauble, before we rec- 
ognised it.L To the ill-starred Burns was given the power of 
making man's life more venerable, but that of wisely guid- 

245 ing his own life was not givenr Destiny, — for so in our 
ignorance we must speak, — his faults, the faults of others, 
proved too hard for him ; and that spirit, which might have 
soared could it but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its 
glorious faculties trodden under foot in the blossom; and 

250 died, we may almost say, without ever having lived. And 
so kind and warm a soul ; so full of inborn riches, of love 
to all living and lifeless things ! How his heart flows out 
in sympathy over universal Nature ; and in her bleakest 
provinces discerns a beauty and a meaning ! The " Daisy '' 

255 falls not unheeded under his ploughshare ; nor the ruined 
nest of that " wee, cowering, timorous beastie,'' cast forth, 
after all its provident pains, to ^^ thole the sleety dribble and 
cranreuch cauld.'' The '^ hoar visage '' of Winter delights 
him ; he dwells with a sad and oft-returning fondness in 

2()0 these scenes of solemn desolation ; but the voice of the tem- 
pest becomes an anthem to his ears ; he loves to walk in the 
sounding woods, for ^^ it raises his thoughts to Him that walk- 
eth on the icings of the ivincl.^^ A true Poet-soul, for it needs 
but to be struck, and the sound it yields will be music ! 

265 But observe him chiefly as he mingles with his brother men. 
What warm, all-comprehending fellow-feeling ; w^hat trust- 
ful, boundless love ; what generous exaggeration of the ob- 
ject loved ! His rustic friend, his nut-brown maiden, are no 
longer mean and homely, but a hero and a queen, whom he 

270 prizes as the paragons of Earth. The rough scenes of Scot- 
tish life, not seen by him in any Arcadian illusion, but in the. 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 9 

rude contradiction, in the smoke and soil of a too harsh 
reality, are still lovely to him : Poverty is indeed his com- 
panion, but Love also, and Courage ; the simple feelings, the 

275 worth, the nobleness, that dwell under the straw roof, are 
dear and venerable to his heart : and thus over the lowest 
provinces of man's existence he pours the glory of his own 
soul ; and they rise, in shadow and sunshine, softened and 
brightened into a beauty which other eyes discern not in 

280 the highest. He has a just self -consciousness, which too 
often degenerates into pride ; yet it is a noble pride, for de- 
fence, not for offence ; no cold suspicious feeling, but a frank 
and social one. The Peasant Poet bears himself, we might 
say, like a King in exile : he is cast among the low, and 

285 feels himself equal to the highest ; yet he claims no rank, 
that none may be disputed to him. The forward he can 
repel, the supercilious he can subdue ; pretensions of wealth 
or ancestry are of no avail with him ; there is a fire in that 
dark eye, under which the '^ insolence of condescension '' 

290 cannot thrive. In his abasement, in his extreme need, he 
forgets not for a moment the majesty of Poetry and Man- 
hood. And yet, far as he feels himself above common men, 
he wanders not apart from them, but mixes warmly in their 
interests ; nay throws himself into their arms, and, as it 

295 were, entreats them to love him. It is moving to see how, 
in his darkest despondency, this proud being still seeks 
relief from friendship ; unbosoms himself, often to the un- 
worthy ; and, amid tears, strains to his glowing heart a heart 
that knows only the name of friendship. And yet he was 

300 ^' quick to learn *' ; a man of keen vision, before whom com- 
mon disguises afforded no concealment. His understanding 
saw through the hollowness even of accomplished deceivers ; 
but there was a generous credulity in his heart. And so did 
our Peasant show himself among us ; ^^ a soul like an ^olian 

305 harp, in whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through 
them, changed itself into articulate melody.'^ And this was 



10 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

he for whom the world found no fitter business than quar- 
relling with smugglers and vintners, computing excise-dues 
upon tallow, and gauging ale-barrels ! In such toils was 

310 that mighty Spirit sorrowfully wasted : and a hundred years 
may pass on, before another such is given us to waste. 

10. All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has left," 
, seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than a poor muti- 
lated fraction of what was in him ; brief, broken glimpses 

315 of a genius that could never show itself complete ; that 
wanted all things for completeness : culture, leisure, true 
effort, nay even length of life. His poems are, with scarcely 
any exception, mere occasional effusions ; poured forth with 
little premeditation ; expressing, by such means as offered, 

320 the passion, opinion, or humour of the hour. Never in one 
instance was it permitted him to grapple with any subject 
with the full collection of his strength, to fuse and mould it 
in the concentrated fire of his genius. To try by the strict 
rules of Art such imperfect fragments, would be at once 

325 unprofitable and unfair. Nevertheless, there is something 
in these poems, marred and defective as they are, which for- 
bids the most fastidious student of poetry to pass them by. 
Some sort of enduring quality they must have : for after 
fifty years of the wildest vicissitudes in poetic taste, they 

330 still continue to be read ; nay, are read more and more eagerly, 
more and more extensively ; and this not only by literary 
virtuosos, and that class upon whom transitory causes oper- 
ate most strongly, but by all classes, down to the most hard, 
unlettered and truly natural class, who read little, and 

335 especially no poetry, except because they find pleasure in it. 
The grounds of so singular and mde a popularity, which 
extends, in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and 
over all regions where the English tongue is spoken, are 
well worth inquiring into. After every just deduction, it 

340 seems to imply some rare excellence in these works. What 
is that excellence ? 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 11 

\ 11. To answer this question will not lead us far. The^'*"^ . 
excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether "" 
in poetry or prose ; but^ at the same time, it is plain and 

345 easily recognised : his t Sincerity^ his indisputable air of 

i^ruth.j Here are no fabulous^ woes or joys; no hollow fan- 

— — ^Slic sentimentalities ; rio wiredrawn refinings, either in 

thought or feeling J. :the passion that is traced before us has 

glowed in a living heart ; .the opinion he utters has risen in 

350 his own understanding, and been a light to his own steps. 
He does not write from hearsay, but from sight and experi- 
ence ; 'it is the scenes that he has lived and laboured amidst, 
that he describes : those scenes, rude and humble as they 
are, have kindled beautiful emotions in his soul, noble 

355 thoughts, and definite resolves ; and he speaks forth what v 
is in him, not from any outward call of vanity or interest, - 
but because his heart is too full to be silent. \ (He speaks it 
with such melody and modulation as he can ; " in homely S.. 
rustic jingle ; '' but it is his own, and genuin^ This is the j\ 

360 grand secret for finding readers and r^t^ining them: let ^^ 
him who would move and convince'^lters, be first moved 
and convinced himself. Horace's rule, Si vis me flere, is 
applicable in a wider sense than the literal one. ^To every y 
poet, to every writer, we might say : Be true, if you would 

365 be believed. Let a man but speak forth with genuine ear- 
nestness the thought, the emotion, the actual condition of 
his own heart ; and other men, so strangely ar.e^^e all knit 
together by the tie of sympathy, must>atl will give heed 
to him. In culture, in extent of yie^^we ma,y stand above 

370 the speaker, or below him ; but in either ease, his words, if 
they are earnest and sincere, will find'^some response within 
us ; for in spite of all casual varieties in outward rank or 
inward, as face answers to face, so does the heart of man to 
man. 

375 12. This may appear a very simple principle, and one 
which Burns had little merit in discovering. True, the 








12 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

discovery is easy enough: but the practical appliance is 
not easy; is indeed the fundamental difficulty which all 
poets have to. strive with, and which scarcely one in the 

380 hundred ever fairly surmounts. A head too dull to discrimi- 
nate the true from the false; a heart too dull to love the 
one at all risks, and to hate the other in spite of all tempta- 
tions, are alike fatal to a writer. With either, or, as more 
commonly happens, with both of these deficiencies combine 

385 a love of distinction, a wish to be original, which is seldom 
wanting, and we have Affectation, the bane of literature, as 
Cant, its elder brother, is of morals. How often does the 
one and the other front us, in poetry, as in life ! Great 
poets themselves are not always free of this vice ; nay, it is 

390 precisely on a certain sort and degree of greatness that it is 
most commonly ingrafted. A strong effort after excellence 
will sometimes solace itself with a mere shadow of success ; 
he who has much to unfold, will sometimes unfold it imper- 
fectly. Byron, for instance, was no common man : yet if 

395 we examine his poetry with this view, we shall find it far 
enough from faultless. Generally speaking, we should say 
that it is not true. He refreshes us, not with the divine 
fountain, but too often with vulgar strong waters, stimu- 
lating indeed to the taste, but soon ending in dislike, or even 

400 nausea. Are his Harolds and Giaours, we would ask, real 
men ; we mean, poetically consistent and conceivable men ? 
Do not these characters, does not the character of their 
author, which more or less shines through them all, rather 
appear a thing put on for the occasion ; no natural or possi- 

405 ble mode of being, but something intended to look much 
grander than nature ? Surely, all these stormful agonies, 
this volcanic heroism, superhuman contempt and moody 
desperation, with so much scowling, and teeth-gnashing, 
and other sulphurous humour, is more like the brawling 

410 of a player in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three 
hours, than the bearing of a man in the business of life, 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 13 

which is to last threescore and ten years. To our minds 
there is a taint of this sort, something which we should call 
theatrical, false, affected, in every one of these otherwise so 

415 powerful pieces. Perhaps Don Juan, especially the latter 
parts of it, is the only thing approaching to a sincere work, 
he ever wrote ; the only work where he showed himself, in 
any measure, as he was ; and seemed so intent on his subject 
as, for moments, to forget himself. Yet Byron hated this 

420 vice ; we believe, heartily detested it : nay he had declared 
formal war against it in word5. So difficult is it even 
" for the strongest to make this primary attainment, which 
might seem the simplest of all: to read its own conscious- 
ness without mistakes, without errors involuntary or wil- 

425 ful ! We recollect no poet of Burns' s susceptibility who 
comes before us from the first, and abides with us to the 
last, with such a total want of affectation. He is an honest 
man, and an honest writer. In his successes and his fail- 
ures, in his greatness and his littleness, he is ever clear, 

430 simple, true, and glitters with no lustre but his own. We 
reckon this to be a great virtue; to be, in fact, the root of 
most other virtues, literary as well as moral. 

13. Here, however, let us say, it is to the Poetry of 
Burns that we now allude ; to those writings which he had 

435 time to meditate, and where no special reason existed to 
warp his critical feeling, or obstruct his endeavour to fulfil 
it. Certain of his Letters, and other fractions of prose 
composition, by no means deserve this praise. Here doubt- 
less, there is not the same natural truth of style ; but on 

440 the contrary, something not only stiff, but strained and 
twisted ; a certain high-flown inflated tone ; the stilting 
emphasis of which contrasts ill with the firmness and rugged 
simplicity of even his poorest verses. Thus no man, it 
would appear, is altogether unaffected. Does not Shak- 

^5 speare himself sometimes premeditate the sheerest bombast ! 
But even with regard to these Letters of Burns, it is but 



14 CAELYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

fair to state that he had two excuses. The first was his ^ 
comparati ve deficiency in lan ^ua^e" BurnSj-Tlioiigh for 
most part he writes with singular force and even graceful- 

450 ness, is not master of English prose, as he is of Scottisj i 
v^T-^^' iiot master of it, we mean, in proportion to the depth 
and Vehemence of his matter. These Letters strike us as 
the effort of a man to express something which he has no 
organ fit for expressing. But a second and weightier excuse 

455 is to be found in the peculiarity of Burns' s social rank. 
His correspondents are oftfen men whose relation to him he 
has never accurately ascertained; whom therefore he is 
either forearming himself against, or else unconsciously 
flattering, by adopting the style he thinks will please them. 

460 At all events we should remember that these faults, even in 
his Letters, are not the rule, but the exception. Whenever he 
writes, as one would ever wish to do, to trusted friends and 
on real interests, his style becomes simple, vigorous, expres- 
sive, sometimes even beautiful. His letters to Mrs. Dunlop 

465 are uniformly excellent. 

14. But we return to his Poetry. In addition to its Sin- 
cerity, it has another peculiar merit, which indeed is but a 
Ajt\ mode, or perhaps a means, of the foregoing ; this displays 
Xy i itself in his choice of subjects; or rather in his indifference 

470 as to subjects, and the power he has of making all subjects 
interesting. The ordinary poet, like the ordinary man, is 
forever seeking in external circumstances the help which 
can be found only in himself. In what is familiar and 
near at hand, he discerns no form of comeliness : home is 

475 not poetical but prosaic ; it is in some past, distant, con- 
ventional heroic world, that poetry resides ; were he there 
and not here, were he thus and not so, it would be well 
with him. Hence our innumerable host of rose-coloured 
Novels and iron-mailed Epics, with their locality not on 

480 the Earth, but somewhat nearer to the Moon. Hence our 
Virgins of the Sun, and our Knights of the Cross, mali- 




CARLYLE'Sf ESSAY ON BURNS 1^5 



cious Saracens in turbans, and copper-coloured Chiefs in 
wampum, and so many other truculent figures from the 
heroic times or the heroic climates, who on all hands swarm 

485 in our poetry. Peace be with them ! But yet, as a great 
moralist proposed preaching to the men of this century, so 
would we fain preach to the poets, " a sermon on the duty 
of staying at home." Let them be sure that heroic ages 
and heroic climates can do little for them. That form of 

490 life has attraction for us, less because it is better or nobler 
than our OAvn, than simply because it is different; and 
even this attraction must be of the most transient sort. 
For will not our own age, one day, be an ancient one; 
and have as quaint a costume as the rest ; not contrasted 

495 with the rest, therefore, but ranked along with them, in 
respect of quaintness ? Does Homer interest us now, be- 
cause he wrote of what passed beyond his native Greece, 
and two centuries before he was born ; or because he wrote 
what passed in God's world, and in the heart of man, which 

500 is the same after thirty centuries ? Let our poets look to 
this : is their feeling really finer, truer, and their vision 
deeper than that of other men, — they have nothing to fear, 
even from the humblest subject; is it not so, — they have 
nothing to hope, but an ephemeral favour, even from the 

505 highest. , f , I TZl 

15. The poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek for 
a subject : the elements of his art are in him, and around 
him on every hand; for him the Ideal world is not remote 
from the Actual, but under it and within it: nay, he is a 

510 poet, precisely because he can discern it there. Wherever 
there is a sky above him, and a world around him, the poet 
is in his place; for here too is man's existence, with its 
infinite longings and small acquirings; its ever-thwarted, 
ever-renewed endeavours ; its unspeakable aspirations, its 

515 fears and hopes that wander through Eternity ; and all the 
mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever made 



16 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

of, in any age or climate, since man first began to live. Is 
there not the fifth act of a Tragedy in every death-bed, 
though it were a peasant's and a bed of heath ? And are 

520 wooings and weddings obsolete, thgit there can be Comedy 
no longer ? Or are men suddenly grown wise, that Laugh- . 
ter must no longer shake his sides, but be cheated o^his 
Farce ? Man's life and nature is, as it was, and as l(5 will 
ever be. But the poet must have an eye to readr the; 

525 things, and a heart to understand • them ; or they cmne^( 
pass away before him in vain. He is a vates^ a seer ; gi giit 
of vision has been given him. Has life no meaning's for 
him, which another cannot equally decipher; theri l^^is no 
poet, and Delphi itself will not make him one.\ / VL 

530 16. In this respect. Burns, though not pethaps abso- 
lutely a great poet, better manifests his capability, better 
proves the truth of his genius, than if he had by his own 
strength kept the whole Minerva Press going, to the end 
of his literary course. He shows himself at least a poet of 

535 Nature's own making ; and Nature, after all, is still the 
grand agent in making poets. We often hear of this and 
the other external condition being requisite for the exist- 
ence of a poet. Sometimes it is a certain sort of training ; 
he must have studied certain things, studied for instance 

540 " the elder dramatists," and so learned a poetic language ; 
as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the heart. At other 
times we are told he must be bred in a certain rank, and 
must be on a confidential footing with the higher classes ; 
because, above all things, he must see the world. As to 

545 seeing the world, we apprehend this will cause him little 
difficulty, if he have but eyesight to see it with. Without 
eyesight, indeed, the task might be hard. The blind or 
the purblind man "travels from Dan to Beersheba, and 
finds it all barren." But happily every poet is born in 

550 the world ; and sees it, with or against his will, every day 
and every hour he lives. The mysterious workmanship of 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 17 

man^s heart, the true light and the inscrutable darkness of 
man's destiny, reveal themselves not only in capital cities 
and crowded saloons, but in every hut and hamlet where men 

555 have their abode. Nay, do not the elements of all human 
virtues and all human vices; the passions at once of a 
Borgia and of a Luther, lie written, in stronger or fainter 
lines, in the consciousness of every individual bosom, that 
has practised honest self-examination ? Truly this same 

560 world may be seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, if we look 
well, as clearly as it ever came to light in Crockford's, or 
the Tuileries itself. 

17. But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on 
the poor aspirant to poetry ; for it is hinted that he should 

565 have been horn two centuries ago ; inasmuch as poetry, 
about that date, vanished from the earth, and became no 
longer attainable by men ! Such cobweb speculations have, 
now and then, overhung the field of literature ; but they 
obstruct not the growth of any plant there : the Shakspeare 

570 or the Burns, unconsciously and merely as he walks onward, 
silently brushes them away. Is not every genius an impos- 
sibility till he appear ? Why do we call him new and origi- 
nal, if we saw where his marble was lying, and what fabric 
he could rear from it ? It is not the material but the work- 

575 man that is wanting. It is not the dark place that hinders, 
but the dim eye, A Scottish peasant's life was the meanest 
and rudest of all lives, till Burns became a poet in it, and a 
poet of it ; found it a man's life, and therefore significant 
to men. A thousand battle-fields remain unsung; but the 

580 Wounded Hare has not perished without its memorial; a 
balm of mercy yet breathes on us from its dumb agonies, 
because a poet was there. Our Halloween had passed and 
repassed, in rude awe and laughter, since the era of the 
Druids ; but no Theocritus, till Burns, discerned in it the 

585 materials of a Scottish Idyl : neither was the Holy Fair any 
Council of Trent or Roman Jubilee; but nevertheless, Super- 



18 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

slition and Hypocrisn and Fun having been propitious to 
liim, in this man's hand it became a poem, instinct with 
satire and genuine comic life. Let but the true poet be 

590 given us, we repeat it, place him where and how you will, 

and true poetry will not be wanting. 
J j 18. Independently of the essential gift of poetic feeling, 
^y as we have now attempted to describe it, a certain rugged 
sterling Avorth pervades whatever Burns has written; a 

595 virtue, as of green fields and mountain breezes, dwells in 
his poetry ; it is redolent of natural life and hardy natural 
men. There is a decisive strength in him, and yet a sweet 
native gracefulness : he is tender, he is vehement, yet with- 
out constraint or too visible effort ; he melts the heart, or 

600 inflames it, with a power which seems habitual and familiar 
to him. We see that in this man there was the gentleness, 
the trembling pity of a woman, with the deep earnestness, 
the force and passionate ardour of a hero. Tears lie in 
him, and consuming fire; as lightning hirks in the drops 

605 of the summer cloud. \He has a resonance in his bosom for\ 
every note of human feeling ; the high and the low, the sad, 
the ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in their turns to his^ 
"lightly-moved and all-conceiving spirit." And observe 
with what a fierce prompt force he grasps his subject, be 

610 it what it may ! How he fixes, as it were, the full image 
of the matter in his eye ; full and clear in every lineament ; 
and catches the real type and essence of it, amid a thousand 
accidents and superficial circumstances, no one of which 
misleads him! Is it of reason; some truth to be discov- 

615 ered ?Xli^^ sophistry, no vain surface-logic detains him ; 
quick, resolute, unerring, he pierces through into the mar- 
row of the question ; and speaks his verdict with an empha- 
sis that cannot be forgotten/] Is it of description; some 
visual object to be represented? [No poet of any age or 

620 nation is more graphic than Burns : the characteristic fea- 
tures disclose themselves to him at a glance; three lines 



A^ 



W. 



<^ 







^ P^ 



m ^ 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 19 

from his hand, and we have a likeness. And, in that rough 

dialect, in that rude, often awkward metre, so clear and 

definite a likeness ! It seems a draughtsman working with 
625 a burnt stick; and yet the burin of a Eetzsch is not more ^. 

expressive or exact. ' ^'^cytA^ 

19. Of this last excellence, the plainest and most com- 
"^y prehensive of all, being indeed the root and foundation of 

every sort of talent, poetical or intellectual, we could pro- 
630 duce innumerable instances from the writings of Burns. 

Take these glimpses of a snow-storm from his Winter 

Night (the italics are ours) ; 

When biting Boreas, fell and doure, 
Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r, 
635 And Phoebus gies a short-liv'^d glowr 

Far south the lift, 
V Dim darkening thro'' the flaky shower 

Or ivhirli7ig drift : 

'Ae night the storm the steeples rock'd, 
640 Poor labour sweet in sleep was lock'd, 

While burns wV S7iawy im^eeths upchok^d 

Wild-eddying sivirl, 

Or thro' the mining outlet bock'd, 

Down headlong hurl. 

645 Are there not '' descriptive touches ^' here ? The describer 
saw this thing; the essential feature and true likeness of 
every circumstance in it ; saw, and not with the eye only. 
" Poor labour locked in sweet sleep ; '' the dead stillness of 
man, unconscious, vanquished, yet not unprotected, while 

650 such strife of the material elements rages, and seems to 
reign supreme in loneliness: this is of the heart as well 
as of the eye ! — Look also at his image of a thaw, and 
prophesied fall of the Auld Brig : 

When heavy, dark, continued, a'-day rains 
655 Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains ; 

When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil, 
Or stately Lugar's mossy fountains boil, 



20 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course, 

Or haunted Garpal ^ draws his feeble source, 
660 Arous'd by blust'ring winds and spotting thowes, 

In mony a torrent down his snaw-broo rowes; 

While crashing ice, borne on the roaring speat, 

Sweeps dams and mills and brigs a' to the gate ; 

And from Glenbuck down to the Rottonkey, 
665 Auld Ayr is just one lengthen' d tumbling sea ; 

Then down ye'll hurl, Deil nor ye never rise ! 

And dash the gumlie jaups up to the pouring skies. 

The last line is in itself a Poussin-picture of that Deluge ! 
The welkin has, as it were, bent down with its weight ; the 

670 " gumlie jaups " and the " pouring skies " are mingled to- 
gether ; it is a world of rain and ruin. — In respect of mere 
clearness and minute fidelity, the Farmer'^s commenda- 
tion of his Auld Mare in plough or in cart, may vie 
with Homer's Smithy of the Cyclops, or yoking of Priam's 

675 Chariot. !N"or have we forgotten stout Burn-the-wind 
and his brawny customers, inspired by Scotch Drink: 
but it is needless to multiply examples. One other trait 
of a much finer sort we select from multitudes of such 
among his Songs. It gives, in a single line, to the sad- 

680 dest feeling the saddest environment and local habitation : 

The pale Moon is setting beyond the white loave^ 
And Time is setting wV me, ; 
Farewell, false friends ! false lover, farewell ! 
I'll nae mair trouble them nor thee, O. 

685 20. This clearness of sight we have called the foundation 
of all talent; for in fact, unless we see our object, how shall 
we know how to place or prize it, in our understanding, our 
imagination, our affections ? Yet it is not in itself, per- 
haps, a very high excellence ; but capable of being united 

690 indifferently with the strongest, or with ordinary power. 
Homer surpasses all men in this quality : but strangely 
enough, at no great distance below him are Kichardson and 
1 Fabulosus Hydaspes! — Carlyle's note. 




CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 21 

Defoe. It belongs, in truth, to what is called a lively mind ; 
and gives no sure indication of the higher endowments that 

695 may exist along with it. In all the three cases we have 
mentioned, it is combined with great garrulity; their de- 
scriptions are detailed, ample and lovingly exact; Homer's 
fire bursts through, from time to time, as if by accident ; 
but Defoe and Eichardson have no fire. Burns, again, is 

700 not more distinguished by the clearness than by the impetu- 
ous force of his conceptions. Of the strength, the piercing 
emphasis with which he thought, his emphasis of expression 
may give a humble but the readiest proof. Who ever 
uttered sharper sayings than his ; words more memorable, 

705 now by their burning vehemence, now by their cool vigour 
and laconic pith ? A single phrase depicts a whole subject, 
a whole scene. We hear of " a gentleman that derived his 

S^^atent of nobility direct from Almighty God." Our Scot- 

Qv ytish forefathers in the battle-field struggled forward " red- 

710 wat-sJiod : '^ in this one word, a full vision of horror and 
carnage, perhaps too frightfully accurate for Art ! 

/ 21. In fact, one of the leading features in the mind 
Qi?of Burns is this vigour o f his strictly intellectual percep- 
tions. A resolute force is ever visible in his judgments, 

715 and in his feelings and volitions. Professor Stewart says 
of him, with some surprise: ^^All the faculties of Burns's 
mind were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous; 
and his predilection for poetry was rather the result 
of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of 

720 a genius exclusively adapted to that species of composi- 
tion. From his conversation I should have pronounced him 
to be fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had 
chosen to exert his abilities.'' But this, if we mistake not, 
is at all times the very essence of a truly poetical endow- 

725 ment. Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where 
the whole consists in a weak-eyed maudlin sensibility, and 
a certain vague random tunefulness of nature, is no separate 



V^' 



^ 



22 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

faculty, no organ which can be superadded to the rest, or 
disjoined from them; but rather the result of their general 

730 harmony and completion. The feelings, the gifts that exist 
in the Poet are those that exist, with more or less develop- 
ment, in every human soul : the imagination, which shud- 
ders at the Hell of Dante, is the same faculty, weaker in 
degree, which called that picture into being. How does 

735 the Poet speak to men, with power, but by being still more 
a man than they ? Shakspeare, it has been well observed, 
in the planning and completing of his tragedies, has shown 
an Understanding, were it nothing more, which might have 
governed states, or indited a Novum Organum. What 

740 Burns's force of understanding may have been, we have less 
means of judging: it had to dwell among the humblest 
objects; never saw Philosophy; never rose, except by natu- 
ral effort and for short intervals, into the region of great 
ideas. Nevertheless, sufficient indication, if no proof suffi- 

745 cient, remains for us in his works : we discern the brawny 
movements of a gigantic though untutored strength; and 
can understand how, in conversation, his quick sure insight 
into men and things may, as much as aught else about him, 
have amazed the best thinkers of his time and country. 

750 22. But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns 
is line as well as strong. The more delicate relations of 
things could not well have escaped his eye, for they were 
intimately present to his heart. uThe logic of the senate 
and the forum is indispensable, but not all-sufficient; nay 

755 perhaps the hi^iest Truth is that which will the most cer- 
tainly elude it^ For this logic works by words, and " the 
highest," it lias been said, " cannot be expressed in words." 
We are not without tokens of an openness for this higher 
truth also, of a keen though uncultivated sense for it, hav- 

760 ing existed in Burns. Mr. Stewart, it will be remembered, 
^^ wonders," in the passage above quoted, that Burns had 
formed some distinct conception of the '^ doctrine of associ- 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY OK BURNS 23 

ation/' We rather think that far subtler things than the 
doctrine of association had from of old been familiar to him. 
765 Here for instance : 

23. *' We know nothing," thus writes he, '*or next to nothing, of 
the structure of our souls, so we cannot account for tliose seeming 
caprices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with this 
thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes 

770 no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, 
among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the 
wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I 
view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud 
solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing 

775 cadence of a troop of gray plover in an autumnal morning, without 
feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. 
Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing ? Are we a piece 
of machinery, which, like the ^olian harp, passive, takes the impres- 
sion of the passing accident ; or do these workings argue something 

780 within us above the trodden clod ? I own myself partial to such 
proofs of those awful and important realities : a God that made all 
things, man's immaterial and immortal nature, and a world of weal 
or wo beyond death and the grave." 

24. Force and fineness of nnderstandifi^ are often spoken 
785 of as something different from general force and fineness of 

nature, as something partly independent of them. The 
necessities of language so require it; but in truth these 
qualities are not distinct and independent: except in spe- 
cial cases, and from special causes, they ever go together. 

790 A man of strong understanding is generally a man of 
strong character ; neither is delicacy in the one kind often 
divided from delicacy in the other. Ko one, at all events, 
is ignorant that in the Poetry of Burns keenness of insight 
keeps pace with keenness of feeling ; that his light is not 

795 more pervading than his warmth. He is a man of the most 
impassioned temper; with passions not strong only, but 
noble, and of the sort in which great virtues and great 
poems take their rise. It is reverence, it is love towards 



/ 



1 



24 CAilLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

all Mature that inspires him, that opens his eyes to its 

800 beauty, and makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise. 
There is a true old saying, that "Love furthers knowl- 
edge : " but above all, it is the living essence of that knowl- 
edge which makes poets ; the first principle of its existence, 
increase, activity. Of Burns's fervid affection, his gener- 

805 ous all-embracing Love, we have spoken already, as of the 
grand distinction of his nature, seen equally in word and 
deed, in his Life and in his Writings. It were easy to 
multiply examples. Not man only, but all that environs 
man in the material and moral universe, is lovely in his 

810 sight : " the hoary hawthorn,'' the " troop of gray plover," 
the " solitary curlew," all are dear to him ; all live in this 
Earth along with him, and to all he is knit as in mysterious 
brotherhood. How touching is it, for instance, that, amidst 
the gloom of personal misery, brooding over the wintry 

815 desolation without him and within him, he thinks of the 
" ourie cattle '' and " silly sheep," and their sufferings in 
the pitiless storm ! 

I thought me on the ourie cattle, 
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 
820 0' wintry war, 

Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, 

Beneath a scaur. 
Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, 
That in the merry months o' spring 
825 Delighted me to hear thee sing, 

What comes o' thee ? 
Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, 

And close thy ee ? 

TJie tenant of the mean hut, with its "ragged roof and 

830 chinky wall,'' has a heart to pity even these ! This is 

worth several homilies on Mercy; for it is the voice of 

Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, lives in sympathy ; his soul 

/ rushes forth into all realms of being ; nothing that has 

u 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 25 

existence can be indifferent to him. The very Devil he 
835 cannot hate with right orthodoxy : 

But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben ; 
O, wad ye tak a thought and men' ! 
Ye aiblins might, — I dinna ken, — 

Still hae a stake ; 
r.,Q I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 

Even for your sake ! 

^^ He is the father of curses and lies/^ said Dr. Slop ; ^^ and 
is cursed and damned already." — ^^ I am sorry for it," 
quoth my uncle Toby ! — a Poet without Love were a 
845 physical and metaphysical impossibility. 

25. But has not it been said, in contradiction to this 
principle, that " Indignation makes verses " ? It has been 
so said, and is true enough : but tte contradiction is appar- 
ent, not real. TThe Indignation which makes verses is, prop- 

850 erly speakin^an inverted Love ; the love of some right, 
some worth, some goodness, belonging to ourselves or others, 
Avhich has been injured, and which this tempestuous feeling 
issues forth to defend and avenge. No selfish fury of heart, 
existing there as a primary feeling, and without its opposite, 

855 ever produced , much Poetry : otherwise, we suppose, the 
Tiger were the most musical of all our choristers. Johnson 
said, he loved a good hater ; by which he must have meant, 
not so much one that hated violently, as one that hated 
wisely ; hated baseness from love of nobleness. However, 

860 in spite of Johnson's paradox, tolerable enough for once in 
speech, but which need not have been so often adopted in 
print since then, we rather believe that good men deal 
sparingly in hatred, either wise or unwise : nay that a 
^^good" hater is still a desideratum in this world. The 

865 Devil, at least, who passes for the chief and best of that 
class, is said to be nowise an amiable character. 

26. Of the verses which Indignation makes. Burns has 
also given us specimens : and among the best that were 



J 



26 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

ever given. Who will forget his Dweller in yon Dungeon 
870 dark ; a piece that might have been chanted by the Furies 
of ^schylus ? The secrets of the Infernal Pit are laid 
bare; a boundless baleful "darkness visible;" and streaks 
of hell-fire quivering madly in its black haggard bosom ! 

Dweller in yon Dungeon dark, 
875 Hangman of Creation, mark ! 

Who in widow's weeds appears, 
Laden with unhonoured years. 
Noosing with care a bursting purse, 
Baited with many a deadly curse ! 

880 27. Why should we speak of Scots ivha Jiae ivP Wallace 
bled; since all know of it, from the king to the meanest 
of his subjects ? This dithyrambic was composed on horse- 
back ; in riding in the middle of tempests, over the wildest 
Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, observ- 

885 ing the poet's looks, forbore to speak, — judiciously enough, 
for a man composing Bruce^s Address might be unsafe to 
trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, 
as he formed it, through the soul of Burns : but to the 
external ear, it should be sung with the throat of the whirl- 

890 wind. So long as there is warm blood in the heart of 
Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this 
war-ode ; the best, we believe, that was ever written by any 
pen. 

28. Another wild stormful Song, that dwells in our ear 

895 and mind with a strange tenacity, is Macplierson^ s Fare- 
icell. Perhaps there is something in the tradition itself 
that cooperates. For was not this grim Celt, this shaggy 
Northland Cacus, that " lived a life of sturt and strife, and 
died by treacherie," — was not he too one of the Nimrods 

900 and Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of his own remote 
misty glens, for want of a clearer and wider one? Nay, 
was there not a touch of grace given him ? A fibre of love 
and softness, of poetry itself, must have lived in his savage 



CAKLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 27 

heart : for he composed that air the night before his execii- 
905 tion ; on the wings of that poor melody his better soul 
would soar away above oblivion, pain, and all the ignominy 
and despair, which, like an avalanche, was hurling him to 
the abyss ! Here also, as at Thebes, and in Pelops' line, 
was material Fate matched against man's Free-will ; matched 
910 in bitterest though obscure duel ; and the ethereal soul sank 
not, even in its blindness, without a cry which has survived 
it. But who, except Burns, could have given words to such 
a soul ; words that we never listen to withoiit a strange 
half-barbarous, half-poetic fellow-feeling ? 

915 Sae rantingly^ sae wantonly^ 

Sae dauntingly gaed he ; 
He played a spring^ and danced it rounds 
Below the gallows-tree. 

29. Under a lighter disguise, the same principle of Love, 

920 which we have recognized as the great characteristic of 
Burns, and of all true poets, occasionally manifests itself 
in the shape of Humour. Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny 
moods, a full buoyant flood of mirth rolls through the mind 
of Burns ; he rises to the high, and stoops to the low, and 

925 is brother and playmate to all Nature. We speak not of 
his bold and often irresistible faculty of caricature ; for this 
is Drollery rather than Humour : but a much tenderer sport- 
fulness dwells in him; and comes forth here and there, in 
evanescent and beautiful touches ; as in his Address to the 

930 Mouse, or the Farmer^ s Mare, or in his Elegy on poor Madlie, 
which last may be reckoned his happiest effort of this kind. 
In these pieces there are traits of a Humour as fine as that 
of Sterne; yet altogether different, original, peculiar, — the 
Humour of Burns. 

935 30. Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many 
other kindred qualities of Burns's Poetry, much more might 
be said ; but now, with these poor outlines of a sketch, we 
must prepare to quit this part of our subject. To speak of 



28 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

his individual Writings, adequately and with any detail, 

940 would lead us far beyond our limits. As already hinted, 
we can look on but few of these pieces as, in strict critical 
language, deserving the name of Poems: they are rhymed' 
eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense ; yet seldom essen- 
tially melodious, aerial, poetical. Tarn o' Shanter itself, 

945 which enjoys so high a favour, does not appear to us at all 
decisively to come under this last category. It is not so 
much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric; the heart 
and body of the story still lies hard and dead. He has not 
gone back, much less carried us back, into that dark, earnest, 

950 wondering age, when the tradition was believed, and when 
it took its rise ; he does not attempt, by any new-modelling 
of his supernatural ware, to strike anew that deep myste- 
rious chord of human nature, which once responded to such 
things; and which lives in us too, and will forever live, 

955 though silent now, or vibrating Avith far other notes, and to 
far different issues. Our German readers will understand 
us, when we say, that he is not the Tieck but the Musaus 
of this tale. Externally it is all green and living ; yet look 
closer, it is no firm growth, but only ivy on a rock. The 

960 piece does not properly cohere : the strange chasm which 
yawns in our incredulous imaginations between the Ayr 
public-house and the gate of Tophet, is nowhere bridged 
over, nay the idea of such a bridge is laughed at ; and thus 
the Tragedy of the adventure becomes a mere drunken 

905 phantasmagoria, or many-coloured spectrum painted on ale- 
vapours, and the Farce alone has any reality. We do not 
say that Burns should have made much more of this tradi- 
tion; we rather think that, for strictly poetical purposes, 
not much ivas to be made of it. Neither are we Jolind to 

970 the deep, varied, genial power displayed in what he has 
actually accomplished ; but we find far more '^ Shakspear- 
ean^' qualities, as these of Tam o' Shanter have been 
fondly named, in many of his other pieces ; nay we incline 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 29 

to believe that this latter might have been written, all but 

975 quite as well, by a man who in place of genius, had only- 
possessed talent. 

31. Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most strictly 
poetical of all his "poems'' is one which does not appear 
in Currie's Edition; but has been often printed before 

980 and since, under the humble title of The Jolly Beggars. 
The subject truly is among the lowest in nature; but it 
only the more shows our Poet's gift in raising it into the 
domain of Art. To our minds, this piece seems thoroughly 
compacted ; melted together, refined ; and poured forth in 

085 one flood of true liquid harmony. It is light, airy, soft of* 
movement ; yet sharp and precise in its details ; every face 
is a portrait : that raucle carlin, that wee Apollo, that 
Son of Mars are Scottish, yet ideal ; the scene is at once 
a dream, and the very Eagcastle of " Poosie-Nansie." Far- 

990 ther, it seems in a considerable degree complete, a real self- 
supporting Whole, which is the highest merit in a poem. 
The blanket of the Night is drawn asunder for a moment ; 
in full, ruddy, flaming light, these rough tatterdemalions 
are seen in their boisterous revel ; for the strong pulse of 

995 Life vindicates its right to gladness even here ; and when 
the curtain closes, we prolong the action, without effort; 
the next day as the last, our Caird and our Balladmon- 
ger are singing and soldiering ; their " brats and callets " 
are hawking, begging, cheating; and some other night, in 
1000 new combinations, they will wring from Pate another hour 
of wassail and good cheer. Apart from the universal sym- 
pathy with man which this again bespeaks in Burns, a 
genuine inspiration and no inconsiderable technical talent 
are manifested here. There is the fidelity, humour, warm 
1005 life and accurate painting and grouping of some Teniers, 
for whom hostlers and carousing peasants are not without 
significance. It would be strange, doubtless, to call this 
the best of Burns's writings : we mean to say only, that it 



30 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

seems to us the most perfect of its kind, as a piece of poeti- 
1010 cal composition, strictly so called. In the Beggars^ Opera, 
in the Beggars^ Bush as other critics have already remarked, 
there is nothing which, in real poetic vigour, equals this 
Cantata ; nothing, as we think, which comes within many 
degrees of it. 

1015 32. But by far the most finished, complete and truly 
inspired pieces of Burns are, without dispute, to be found 
among his Songs. It is here that, although through a 
small aperture, his light shines with least obstruction ; in 
its highest beauty and pure sunny clearness. The reason 

1020 may be, that Song is a brief simple species of composition ; 
and requires nothing so much for its perfection as genuine 
poetic feeling, genuine music of heart. Yet the Song has 
its rules equally with the Tragedy ; rules which in most 
cases are poorly fulfilled, in many cases are not so much as 

1025 felt. We might write a long essay on the Songs of Burns ; 
which we reckon by far the best that Britain has yet pro- 
duced: for indeed, since the era of Queen Elizabeth, we 
know not that, by any other hand, aught truly worth atten- 
tion has been accomplished in this department. True, we 

1030 have songs enough '' by persons of quality ; " we have taw- 
dry, hollow, wine-bred madrigals; many a rhymed speech 
" in the flowing and watery vein of Ossorius the Portugal 
Bishop,'' rich in sonorous words, and, for moral, dashed per- 
haps with some tint of a sentimental sensuality ; all which 

1035 many persons cease not from endeavouring to sing ; though 
for most part, we fear, the music is but from the throat 
outwards, or at best from some region far enough short of 
the Soul ; not in which, but in a certain inane Limbo of 
the Fancy, or even in some vaporous debatable-land on the 

1040 outskirts of the Nervous System, most of such madrigals 
and rhymed speeches seem to have originated. 

33. With the Songs of Burns we must not name these 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 31 

things. Independently of the clear, manly, heartfelt sen- 
timent that ever pervades Ms poetry, his Songs are honest 

1045 in another point of view: in form, as well as in spirit. 
• They do not affect to be set to music, but they actually 
and in themselves are music ; they have received their life, 
and fashioned themselves together, in the medium of Har- 
mony, as Venus rose from the bosom of the sea. The 

1050. story, the feeling, is not detailed, but suggested; not said, 
or spouted, in rhetorical completeness and coherence ; but 
sung, in fitful gushes, in glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, 
in warhlings not of the voice only, but of the whole mind. 
We consider this to be the essence of a song ; and that no 

1055 songs since the little careless catches, and as it were drops 
of song, which Shakspeare has here and there sprinkled 
over his Plays, fulfil this condition in nearly the same 
degree as most of Burns's do. Such grace and truth of 
external movement, too, presupposes in general a corre- 

1060 sponding force and truth of sentiment and inward mean- 
ing. The Songs of Burns are not more perfect in the 
former quality than in the latter. With what tenderness 
he sings, yet with what vehemence and entireness ! There 
is a piercing wail in his sorrow, the purest rapture in his 

1065 joy ; he burns with the sternest ire, or laughs with the 
loudest or sliest mirth ; and yet he is sweet and soft, 
'^ sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, and soft as 
their parting tear." If we farther take into account the 
immense variety of his subjects; how, from the loud flow- 

1070 ing revel in Willie brewed a Feck d' Maut, to the still, 

rapt enthusiasm of sadness for Mary in Heaven ; from 

tj the glad kind greeting of Auld Lang syne, or the comic 

archness of Duncan Gray, to the fire-eyed fury of Scots 

iclia hae tvi^ Wallace bled, he has found a tone and words for 

1075 every mood of man's heart, — it will seem a small praise 
if we rank him as the first of all our Song- writers ; for we 
know not where to find one worthy of being second to him. 



/^ 



32 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

34. It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns's chief 
influence as an author will ultimately be found to depend : 
1080 nor, if our Fletcher's aphorism is true, shall we account 
this a small influence. " Let me make the songs of a peo- 
ple,'' said he, " and you shall make its laws." Surely, if 
ever any Poet might have equalled himself with Legisla- 
tors on this ground, it was Burns. His Songs are already 
1085 part of the mother-tongue, not of Scotland only but of 
Britain, and of the millions that in all ends of the earth 
speak a British language. In hut and hall, as the heart 
unfolds itself in many-coloured joy and woe of existence, 
^ the name, the voice of that joy and that woe, is the name 
"" 1090 and voice which Burns has given them. Strictly speaking, 
perhaps no British man has so deeply affected the thoughts 
and feelings of so many men, as this solitary and altogether 
private individual, with means apparently the humblest. 
^ 35. In another point of view, moreover, Av^e incline to 
1095 think that Burns's influence may have been considerable : 
we mean, as exerted specially on the Literature of his coun- 
try, at least on the Literature of Scotland. Among the 
great changes which British, particularly Scottish literature, 
has undergone since that period, one of the greatest will be 
1100 found to consist in its remarkable increase of nationality. 
^ Even the English writers, most popular in Burns's time, 
"^^ were little distinguished for their literary patriotism, in this 
_\ its best sense. ^^ certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had, 
in good measure, taken place of the old insular home-feel- 
^^il05 i ng^ literature was, as it were, without any local environ- 
ment ; was not nourished by the affections which spring 
from a native soil. Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write 
almost as if in vacuo ; the thing written bears no mark of 
place; it is not written so much for Englishmen, as for 
1110 men ; or rather, which is the inevitable result of this, for 
certain Generalisations which philosophy termed men. 
Goldsmith is an exception ; not so Johnson ; the scene of 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 33 

his Rambler is little more English than that of his 
Easselas. 

1115 36. But if such was, in some degree, the case with Eng- 
land, it was, in the highest degree, the case with Scotland. 
In fact, our Scottish literature had, at that period, a very 
singular aspect; unexampled, so far as we know, except 
perhaps at Geneva, where the same state of matters appears 

1120 still to continue. For a long period after Scotland became 
British, we had no literature : at the date when Addison and 
Steele were writing their Spectators, our good John Boston 
was writing, with, the noblest intent, but alike in defiance 
of grammar and philosophy, his Fourfold State of Man. 

1125 Then came the schisms in our National Church, and the 
fiercer schisms in our Body Politic; Theologic ink, and 
Jacobite blood, with gall enough in both cases, seemed to 
have blotted out the intellect of the country : however, it 
was only obscured, not obliterated. Lord Kames made 

1130 nearly the first attempt at writing English ; and ere long, 
Hume, Eobertson, Smith, and a whole host of followers, 
attracted hither the eyes of all Europe. And yet in this 
brilliant resuscitation of our " fervid genius," there was 
nothing truly Scottish, nothing indigenous ; except, per- 

1135 haps, the natural impetuosity of intellect, which we some- 
times claim, and are sometimes upbraided with, as a 
characteristic of our nation. It is curious to remark that 
Scotland, so full of writers, had no Scottish culture, nor 
indeed any English ; our culture was almost exclusively 

1140 French. It was by studying Eacine and Voltaire, Batteux 
and Boileau, that Kames had trained himself to be a critic 
and philosopher ; it was the light of Montesquieu and 
Mably that guided Eobertson in his political speculations ; 
Quesnay's lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith. 

1145 Hume was too rich a man to borrow ; and perhaps he re- 
acted on the French more than he was acted on by them : 
but neither had he aught to do with Scotland ; Edinburgh, 



34 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

equally with La Fleche, was but the lodging and laboratory, 
in which he not so much morally lived, as metaphysically 

1150 investigated. Never, perhaps, was there a class of writers 
so clear and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, to all 
appearance, of any patriotic affection, nay of any human 
affection whatever. The French wits of the period were as 
unpatriotic : but their general deficiency in moral jjrinciple, 

1155 not to say their avowed sensuality and unbelief in all virtue, 
strictly so called, render this accountable enough. We 
hope, there is a patriotism founded on something better 
than prejudice ; that our country may be dear to us, with- 
out injury to our philosophy ; that in loving and justly 

1160 prizing all other lands, we may prize justly, and yet love 
T3efore all others, our own stern Motherland, and the vener- 
able Structure of social and moral Life, which Mind has 
through long ages been building up for us there. ] Surely 
there is nourishment for the better part of man's he'art in all 

1165 this : surely the roots, that have fixed themselves in the very 
core of man's being, may be so cultivated as to grow up not 
into briers, but into roses, in the field of his life ! Our Scot- 
tish sages have no such propensities : .the field of their life 
shows neither briers nor roses ; but only a flat, continuous 

1170 thrashing-floor for Logic, whereon all questions, from the 

-' Doctrine of Rent " to the " Natural History of Religion," are 

thrashed and sifted with the same mechanical impartiality ! 

37. With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our literature, 

it cannot be denied that much of this evil is past, or rapidly 

1175 passing away : our chief literary men, whatever other faults 
they may have, no longer live among us like a French 
Colony, or some knot of Propaganda Missionaries ; but like 
natural-born subjects of the soil, partaking and sympathising 
in all our attachments, humours and habits. Our literature 

1180 no longer grows in water but in mould, and with the true 
racy virtues of the soil and climate. How much of this 
change may be due to Burns, or to any other individual, it 



S ^ CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 35 

might be difficult to estimate. Direct literary imitation of 
Burns was not to be looked for. But his example, in the 

1185 fearless adoption of domestic subjects, could not but operate 
from afar ; and certainly in no heart did the love of country 
ever burn with a warmer glow than in that of Burns : " a 
tide of Scottish prejudice/' as he modestly calls this deep 
and generous feeling, '^ had been poured along his veins ; 

1190 and he felt that it would boil there till the flood-gates shut 
in eternal rest.'' It seemed to him, as if lie could do so 

X little for his country, and yet would so gladly have done 

•^ all. One small province stood open for him, — that of 

Scottish Song; and how eagerly he entered on it, how 

1195 devotedly he laboured there ! In his toilsome journeyings, 
this object never quits him ; it is the little happy-valley of 
his careworn heart. In the gloom of his own affliction, he 
eagerly searches after some lonely brother of the muse, and 
rejoices to snatch one other name from the oblivion that 

1200 was covering it ! These were early feelings, and they abode 
with him to the end : 

... A wish (I mind its power) , 
A wish, that to my latest hour 
Will strongly heave my breast, — 
1205 That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, 

Some useful plan or book could make, 
Or sing a sang at least. 

The rough bur Thistle spreading wide 
Amang the bearded bear, 
1210 I turn'd my weeding-clips aside, 

And spared the symbol dear. 

^ 38. But to leave the mere literary character of Burns, 
which has already detained us too long. Ear more inter- 
esting than any of his written works, as it appears to us, 
1215 are his acted ones : the Life he willed and was fated to lead 
among his fellow-men. These Poems are but like little 
rhymed fragments scattei-ed here and there in the grand 



36 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

unrhymed Romance of his earthly existence ; and it is only 
when intercalated in this at their proper places, that they 

1220 attain their full measure of significance. And this, too, 
alas, was but a fragment ! The plan of a mighty edifice 
had been sketched ; some columns, porticos, firm masses of 
building, stand completed; the rest more or less clearly 
indicated ; with many a far-stretching tendency, which only 

1225 studious and friendly eyes can now trace towards the pur- 
posed termination. For the work is broken off in the middle, 
almost in the beginning ; and rises among us, beautiful and 
sad, at once unfinished and a ruin ! If charitable judgment 
was necessary in estimating his Poems, and justice required 

1230 that the aim and the manifest power to fulfil it must often 
be accepted for the fulfilment ; much more is this the case 
in regard to his Life, the sum and result of all his endeavours, 
where his difficulties came upon him not in detail only, but 
in mass; and so much has been left unaccomplished, nay 

1235 was mistaken, and altogether marred. 

39. Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life of 
Burns, and that the earliest. We have not youth and man- 
hood, but only youth : for, to the end, we discern no deci- 
sive change in the complexion of his character; in his 

1240 thirty-seventh year, he is still, as it were, in youth. With 
all that resoluteness of judgment, that penetrating insight, 
and singular maturity of intellectual power, exhibited in his 
writings, he never attains to any clearness regarding him- 
self ; to the last, he never ascertains his peculiar aim, even 

1245 with such distinctness as is common among ordinary men; 
and therefore never can pursue it with that singleness of 
will, which insures success and some contentment to such 
men. To the last, he wavers between two purposes : glory- 
ing in his talent, like a true poet, he yet cannot consent to 

1250 make this his chief and sole glory, and to follow it as the 
one thing needful, through poverty or riches, through good 
or evil report. Another far meaner ambition still cleaves to 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 37 

him ; he must dream and struggle about a certain " Rock of 
Independence ; '' which, natural and even admirable as it 

1255 might be, was still but a warring with the world, on the 
comparatively insignificant ground of his being more com- 
pletely or less completely supplied with money than others ; 
of his standing at a higher or at a lower altitude in general 
estimation than others. For the world still appears to him, 

1260 as to the young, in borrowed colours : he expects from it 
what it cannot give to any man ; seeks for contentment, not 
within himself, in action and wise effort, but from without, 
in the kindness of circumstance:, in love, friendship, honour, 
pecuniary ease. He would be happy, not actively and in 

1265 himself, but passively and from some ideal cornucopia of 
Enjoyments, not earned by his own labour, but showered 
on him by the beneficence of Destiny. Thus, like a young 
man, he cannot gird himself up for any worthy well-calcu- 
lated goal, but swerves to and fro, between passionate hope 

1270 and remorseful disappointment : rushing onwards with a 
deep tempestuous force; he surmounts or breaks asunder 
many a barrier; travels, nay advances far, but advancing 
only under uncertain guidance, is ever and anon turned 
from his path ; and to the last cannot reach the only true 

1275 happiness of a man, that of clear decided Activity in the 
^ sphere for which, by nature and circumstances, he has been 
fitted and appointed. 

40. We do not say these things in dispraise of Burns; 
nay, perhaps, they but interest us the more in his favour. 

1280 This blessing is not given soonest to the best ; but rather, 
it is often the greatest minds that are latest in obtaining 
it J for where most is to be developed, most time may be 
required to develop it. A complex condition had been 
assigned him from without; as complex a condition from 

1285 within : no " preestablished harmony '' existed between the 
clay soil of Mossgiel and the empyrean soul of Robert 
Burns ; it was not wonderful that the adjustment between 



38 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

them should have been long postponed, and his arm long 
cumbered, and his sight confused, in so vast and discord- 

1290 ant an economy as he had been appointed steward over. 
Byron was, at his death, but a year younger than Burns ; 
and through life, as it might have appeared, far more 
simply situated: yet in him too we can trace no such 
adjustment, no such moral manhood ; but at best, and only 

1295 a little before his end, the beginning of what seemed such. 

41. By much the most striking incident in Burns's Life 

is his journey to Edinburgh; but perhaps a still more 

important one is his residence at Irvine, so early as in 

his twenty-third year. Hitherto his life had been poor 

1300 and toilworn ; but otherwise not ungenial, and, with all 
its distresses, by no means unhappy. In his parentage, 
deducting outward circumstances, he had every reason to 
reckon himself fortunate. His father was a man of thought- 
ful, intense, earnest character, as the best of our peasants 

1305 are ; valuing knowledge, possessing some, and what is far 
better and rarer, openminded for more : a man with a keen 
insight and devout heart; reverent towards God, friendly 
therefore at once, and fearless towards all that God has 
made : in one word, though but a hard-handed peasant, a 

1310 complete and fully unfolded Man. Such a father is seldom 
found in any rank in society; and was worth descending 
far in society to seek. Unfortunately, he was very poor ; 
had he been even a little richer, almost never so little, the 
whole might have issued far otherwise. Mighty events 

1315 turn on a straw ; the. crossing of a brook decides the con- 
quest of the world. ^Had this William Burns's small seven 
acres of nursery-ground anywise prospered, the boy Robert 
had been sent to school ; had struggled forward, as so many 
weaker men do, to some university; come forth not as a 

1320 rustic wonder, but as a regular well-trained intellectual 
workman, and changed the whole course of British Litera- 
ture, — for it lay in him to have done this ! But the nurs- 



/\ 



^ 



CAELYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 39 



eiy did not prosper; poverty sank his whole family below 
the help of even our cheap school-system : Burns remained 

1325 a hard-worked ploughboy, and British literature took its own 
course. N"evertheless, even in this rugged scene there is 
much to nourish him. If he drudges, it is with his brother, 
and for his father and mother, whom he loves, and would 
fain shield from want. Wisdom is not banished from their 

1330 poor hearth, nor the balm of natural feeling : the solemn 
words, Let us worship God, are heard there from a " priest- 
like father;" if threatenings of unjust men throw mother 
and children into tears, these are tears not of grief only, 
but of holiest affection; every heart in that humble group 

1335 feels itself the closer knit to every other; in their hard war- 
fare they are there together, a "little band of brethren.^^ 
Neither are such tears, and the deep beauty that dwells in 
them, their only portion. Light visits the hearts as it does 
the eyes of all living : there is a force, too, in this youth, 

1340 that enables him to trample on misfortune ; nay, to bind it 
under his feet to make him sport. For a bold, warm, buoy- 
ant humour of character has been given him ; and so the 
thick-coming shapes of evil are welcomed with a gay, 
friendly irony, and in their closest pressure he bates no 

1345 jot of heart or hope. Vague yearnings of ambition fail 
not, as he grows up ; dreamy fancies hang like cloud-cities 
around him ; the curtain of Existence is slowly rising, in 
many-coloured splendour and gloom : and the auroral light 
of first love is gilding his horizon, and the music of song is 

1350 on his path ; and so he walks 

in glory and in joy, 

Behind his plough, upon the mountain side. 

42. We ourselves know, from the best evidence, that up 

to this date Burns was happy ; nay that he was the gayest, 

1355 brightest, most fantastic, fascinating being to be found in 

the world ; more so even than he ever afterwards appeared. 



40 CAKLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

But now, at this early age, he quits the paternal roof; goes 
forth into looser, louder, more exciting society ; and be- 
comes initiated in those dissipations, those Alices, which a 

1360 certain class of philosophers have asserted to be a natural 
preparative for entering an active life ; a kind of mud-bath, 
in which the youth is, as it were, necessitated to steep, and, 
we suppose, cleanse himself, before the real toga of Man- 
hood can be laid on him. We shall not dispute much with 

1365 this class of philosophers ; we hope they are mistaken : for 
Sin and Remorse so easily beset us at all stages of life, and 
are always such indifferent company, that it seems hard we 
should, at any stage, be forced and fated not only to meet 
but to yield to them, and even serve for a term in their 

1370 leprous armada. We hope it is not so. Clear we are, at 
all events, it cannot be the training one receives in this 
DeviPs service, but only our determining to desert from it, 
that fits us for true manly Action. We become men, not 
after we have been dissipated, and disappointed in the 

1375 chase of false pleasure ; but after we have ascertained, in 
any way, what impassable barriers hem us in through this 
life ; how mad it is to hope for contentment to our infinite 
soul from the gifts of this extremely finite world; that a 
man must be sufficient for himself ; and that for suffering 

1380 and enduring there is no remedy but striving and doing. 
\ Manhood begins when we have in any way made truce with 
Necessity ; begins even when we have surrendered to Neces- 
sity, as the most part only do ; but begins joyfully and hope- 
fully only when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity ; 

1385 and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in 
Necessity we are free. Surely, such lessons as this last, 
which, in one shape or other, is the grand lesson for every 
mortal man, are better learned from the lips of a devout 
mother, in the looks and actions of a devout father, while 

1390 the heart is yet soft and pliant, than in collision with the 
sharp adamant of Fate, attracting us to shipwreck us, when 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 41 

the heart is grown hard, and may be broken before it will 
become contrite. Had Burns continued to learn this, as he 
was already learning it, in his father's cottage, he would 

1395 have learned it fully, which he never did ; and been saved 
many a lasting aberration, many a bitter hour and year of 
remorseful sorrow. 

43. It seems to us another circumstance of fatal import 
in Burns's history, that at this time too he became involved 

1400 in the religious quarrels of this district ; that he was en- 
listed and feasted, as the fighting man of the New-Light 
Priesthood, in their highly unprofitable warfare. At the 
tables of these free-minded clergy he learned much more 
than was needful for him. Such liberal ridicule of fanati- 

1405 cism awakened in his mind scruples about Keligion itself; 
and a whole world of Doubts, which it required quite 
another set of conjurers than these men to exorcise. We 
do not say that such an intellect as his could have escaped 
similar doubts at some period of his history ; or even that 

1410 he could, at a later period, have come through them alto- 
gether victorious and unharmed: but it seems peculiarly 
unfortunate that this time, above all others, should have 
been fixed for the encounter. For now, with principles 
assailed by evil example from without, by " passions raging 

1415 like demons " from within, he had little need of sceptical 
misgivings to whisper treason in the heat of the battle, or 
to cut off his retreat if he were already defeated. He loses 
his feeling of innocence ; his mind is a-t variance with 
itself ; the old divinity no longer presides there ; but wild 

1420 Desires and wild Repentance alternately oppress him. 
Ere long, too, he has committed himself before the world ; 
his character for sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant as few 
corrupted worldlings can even conceive, is destroyed in the 
eyes of men ; and his only refuge consists in trying to dis- 

1425 believe his guiltiness, and is but a refuge of lies. The 
blackest desperation now gathers over him, broken only by 



42 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

red lightnings of remorse. The whole fabric of his life is 
blasted asunder ; for now not only his character, but his 
personal liberty, is to be lost ; men and Fortune are leagued 

1430 for his hurt ; '' hungry Euin has him in the wind.'' He 
sees no escape but the saddest of all : exiled from his loved 
country, to a country in every sense inhospitable and abhor- 
rent to him. While the '^ gloomy night is gathering fast," 
in mental storm and solitude, as well as in physical, he 

1435 sings his wild farewell to Scotland : 

Farewell my friends ; farewell my foes ! 
My peace with these, my love with those : 
The bursting tears my heart declare ; 
Adieu, my native banks of Ayr ! 

1440 44. Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods; but still 
a false transitory light, and no real sunshine. He is invited 
to Edinburgh; hastens thither with anticipating heart; is 
welcomed as in a triumph, and with universal blandishment 
and acclamation ; whatever is wisest, whatever is greatest 

1445 or loveliest there, gathers round him, to gaze on his face, to 
show him honour, sympathy, affection. Burus's appearance 
among the sages and nobles of Edinburgh must be regarded 
as one of the most singular phenomena in modern Litera- 
ture ; almost like the appearance of some Napoleon among 

1450 the crowned sovereigns of modern Politics. For it is 
nowise as ^^a mockery king,'' set there by favour, tran- 
siently and for a purpose, that he will let himself be 
treated ; still less is he a mad Rienzi, whose sudden eleva- 
tion turns his too weak head : but he stands there on his 

1455 own basis ; cool, unastonished, holding his equal rank from 
Nature herself ; putting forth no claim Avhich there is not 
strength in him, as well as about him, to vindicate. Mr. 
Lockhart has some forcible observations on this point : 

45. "It needs no effort of imagination," says he, "to conceive 

1460 what the sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all either 

clergymen or professors) must have been in the presence of this big- 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 43 

boned, black-browed, brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, 
who, having forced his way among them from the plough-tail at a sin- 
gle stride, manifested in the whole strain of his bearing and conver- 

1465 sation a most thorough conviction, that in the society of the most 
eminent men of his nation he was exactly where he was entitled to 
be ; hardly deigned to flatter them by exhibiting even an occasional 
symptom of being flattered by their notice ; by turns calmly measured 
himself against the most cultivated understandings of his time in dis- 

1470 cussion ; overpowered the bon-mots of the most celebrated convivialists 
by broad floods of merriment, impregnated with all the burning life of 
genius ; astounded bosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice-piled 
folds of social reserve, by compelling them to tremble, — nay, to trem- 
ble visibly, — beneath the fearless touch of natural pathos ; and all 

1475 this without indicating the smallest willingness to be ranked among 
those professional ministers of excitement, who are content to be 
paid in money and smiles for doing what the spectators and auditors 
would be ashamed of doing in their own persons, even if they had the 
power of doing it ; the last, and probably worst of all, who was known 

1480 to be in the habit of enlivening societies which they would have 
scorned to approach, still more frequently than their own, with elo- 
quence no less magnificent ; with wit, in all likelihood still more dar- 
ing ; often enough, as the superiors whom he fronted without alarm 
might have guessed from the beginning, and had ere long no occasion 

1485 to guess, with wit pointed at themselves." 

46. The farther we remove from this scene, the more 
singular will it seem to us : details of the exterior aspect 
of it are already full of interest. Most readers recollect 
Mr. Walker's personal interviews with Burns as among the 

1490 best passages of his Narrative : a time will come when this 
reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott's, slight though it is, will 
also be precious : 

47. "As for Burns," writes Sir Walter, "I may truly say, Vir- 
gilium vidi tantiim. I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-7, when he came 

1495 first to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling enough to be much 
interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know 
him : but I had very little acquaintance with any literary people, and 
still less with the gentry of the west country, the two sets that he 
most frequented. Mr. Thomas Grierson was at that time a clerk of 



44 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

1500 my father's. He knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodg- 
ings to dinner ; but had no opportunity to keep his word ; otherwise 
I might have seen more of this distinguished man. As it was, I saw 
him one day at the late venerable Professor Ferguson's, where there 
were several gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom I remem- 

1505 ber the celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart. Of course, we youngsters 
sat silent, looked and listened. The only thing I remember which 
was remarkable in Burns's manner, was the effect produced upon him 
by a print of Bunbury\s, representing a soldier lying dead on the 
snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side, — on the other, his widow 

1510 with a child in her arms. These lines were written beneath ; 

' Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, 
Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain ; 
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew. 
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, 
1515 Gave the sad presage of his future years, 

The child of misery baptised in tears.' 

48. "Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather by the 
ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears. He 
asked whose the lines were ; and it chanced that nobody but myself 

1520 remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's 
called by the unpromising title of ' The Justice of Peace.' I whis 
pered my information to a friend present ; he mentioned it to Burns, 
who rewarded me with a look and a word, which, though of mere 
civility, I then received and still recollect with verj^ great pleasure. 

1525 49. ' ' His person was strong and robust ; his manners rustic, not 
clownish ; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received 
part of its effect perhaps from one's knowledge of his extraordinary 
talents. His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's picture : but 
to me it conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if seen in per- 

1530 spective. I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in 
any of the portraits. I should have taken the poet, had I not known 
what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch 
school, i.e. none of your modern agriculturists who keep labourers for 
their drudgery, but the doitce giideman who held his own plough. 

1535 There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his linea- 
ments ; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and 
temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say 
literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw 
such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most dis- 



CAKLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 45 

1540 tingiiished men of my time. His conversation expressed perfect self- 
confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among the men who 
were the most learned of their time and country, he expressed himself 
with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness ; and 
when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, 

1545 yet at the same time with modesty. I do not remember any part of 
his conversation distinctly enough to be quoted ; nor did I ever see 
him again, except in the street, where he did not recognise me, as I 
could not expect he should. He was much caressed in Edinburgh : 
but (considering what literary emoluments have been since his day) 

1550 the efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling. 

50. "I remember, on this occasion I mention, I thought Burns's 
acquaintance with English poetry was rather limited ; and also that, 
having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson, 
he talked of them with too much humility as his models : there was 

1555 doubtless national predilection in his estimate. 

51. " This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have only to add, 
that his dress corresponded with his manner. He was like a farmer 
dressed in his best to dine with the laird. I do not speak in malam 
partem^ when I say, I never saw a man in company with his superiors 

1560 in station or information more perfectly free from either the reality or 
the affectation of embarrassment. I was told, but did not observe it, 
that his address to females was extremely deferential, and always with 
a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their atten- 
tion particularly. I have heard the late Duchess of Gordon remark 

1565 this. — I do not know anything I can add to these recollections of 
forty years since." 

52. The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of 
favour ; the calm, unaffected, manly manner in which he 
not only bore it, but estimated its value, has justly been 

1570 regarded as the best proof that could be given of his real 
vigour and integrity of mind. A little natural vanity, some 
touches of hypocritical modesty, some glimmerings of affec- 
tation, at least some fear of being thought affected, we 
could have pardoned in almost any man ; but no such indi- 

1575 cation is to be traced here. In his unexampled situation the 
young peasant is not a moment perplexed ; so many strange 
lights do not confuse him, do not lead him astray. Never- 



46 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

theless, we cannot but perceive that this winter did him 
great and lasting injury. A somewhat clearer knowledge 

1580 of men's affairs, scarcely of their characters, it did afford 
him; but a sharper feeling of Fortune's unequal arrange- 
ments in their social destiny it also left with him. He had 
seen the gay and gorgeous arena, in which the powerful 
are born to play their parts ; nay had himself stood in 

1585 the midst of it ; and he felt more bitterly than ever, that 
here he was but a looker-on, and had no part or lot in that 
splendid game. From this time a jealous indignant fear 
of social degradation takes possession of him ; and perverts, 
so far as aught could pervert, his private contentment, and 

1590 his feelings towards his richer fellows. It was clear to 
Burns that he had talent enough to make a fortune, or a 
hundred fortunes, could he but have rightly willed this; 
it was clear also that he willed something far different, and 
therefore could not make one. Unhappy it was that he 

1595 had not power to choose the one, and reject the other ; 
but must halt forever between two opinions, two objects; 
making hampered advancement towards either. But so it 
is with many men : we '' long for the merchandise, yet 
would fain keep the price ; " and so stand chaffering with 

1600 Fate, in vexatious altercation, till the night come, and our 
fair is over ! 

53. The Edinburgh Learned of that period were in gen- 
eral more noted for clearness of head than for warmth 
of heart: with the exception of the good old Blacklock, 

1605 whose help was too ineffectual, scarcely one among them 
seems to have looked at Burns with any true sympathy, or 
indeed much otherwise than as at a highly curious tiling. 
By the great also he is treated in the customary fashion ; 
entertained at their tables and dismissed : certain modica 

1610 of pudding and praise are, from time to time, gladly ex- 
changed for the fascination of his presence ; which exchange 
once effected, the bargain is finished, and each party goes 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 47 

his several way. At the end of this strange season, Burns 
gloomily sums up his gains and losses, and meditates on 

1615 the chaotic future. In money he is somewhat richer ; in 
fame and the show of happiness, infinitely richer ; but in 
the substance of it, as poor as ever. Nay poorer ; for his 
heart is now maddened still more with the fever of worldly 
Ambition ; and through long years the disease will rack 

1620 him with unprofitable sufferings, and weaken his strength 
for all true and nobler aims. * 

54. "What Burns was next to do or to avoid ; how a man 
so circumstanced was now to guide himself towards his true 
advantage, might at this point of time have been a question 

1625 for the wisest. It was a question too, which apparently he 

was left altogether to answer for himself : of his learned or 

. rich patrons it had not struck any individual to turn a 

thought on this so trivial matter. Without claiming for 

Burns the praise of perfect sagacity, we must say, that his 

1630 Excise and Farm scheme does not seem to us a very unrea- 
sonable one ; that we should be at a loss, even now, to sug- 
gest one decidedly better. Certain of his admirers have 
felt scandalised at his ever resolving to gauge; and would 
have had him lie at the pool, till the spirit of Patronage 

1635 stirred the waters, that so, with one friendly plunge, all 
his sorrows might be healed. Unwise counsellors ! They 
know not the manner of this spirit ; and how, in the lap 
of most golden dreams, a man might have happiness, were 
it not that in the interim he must die of hunger ! It reflects 

1640 credit on the manliness and sound sense of Burns, that he 
felt so early on what ground he was standing; and pre- 
ferred self-help, on the humblest scale, to dependence and 
inaction, though with hope of far more splendid possi- 
bilities. But even these possibilities were not rejected in 

1645 his scheme : he might expect, if it chanced that he had any 
friend, to rise, in no long period, into something even like 
opulence and leisure ; while again, if it chanced that he had 



48 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

no friend, he could still live in security ; and for the rest, 
he ^^did not intend to borrow honour from any profession.'' 

1650 We reckon that his plan was honest and well-calculated : 
all turned on the execution of it. Doubtless it failed ; yet 
not, we believe, from any vice inherent in itself. I^ay, 
after all, it was no failure of external means, but of inter- 
nal, that overtook Burns. His was no bankruptcy of the 

1(355 purse, but of the soul ; to his last day, he owed no man 
anything.* 

55. Meanwhile he begins well : with two good and wise 
actions. His donation to his mother, munificent from a 
man whose income had lately been seven pounds a-year, 

1660 was worthy of him, and not more than worthy. Generous 
also, and worthy of him, Avas the treatment of the woman 
whose life's welfare now depended on his pleasure. A 
friendly observer might have hoped serene days for him : 
his mind is on the true road to peace with itself : what 

1665 clearness he still wants will be given as he proceeds; for 
the best teacher of duties, that still lie dim to us, is the 
Practice of those we see and have at hand. Had the 
" patrons of genius," who could give him nothing, but 
taken nothing from him, at least nothing more ! The 

1670 wounds of his heart would have healed, vulgar ambition 
Avould have died away. Toil and Frugality would have 
been welcome, since Virtue dwelt with them ; and Poetry 
Avould have shone through them as of old ; and in her clear 
ethereal light which was his own by birthright, he might 

1675 have looked down on his earthly destiny, and all its ob- 
structions, not with patience only, but with love. 
^ 56. But the patron of genius Avould not have it . so. 
Picturesque tourists,^ all manner of fashionable danglers 

1 There is one little sketch by certain ''English gentlemen" of this 
class, which, though adopted in Carrie's Narrative, and since then 
repeated in most others, we have all along felt an invincible disposition 
to regard as imaginary: " On a rock that projected into the stream, they 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 49 

after literature, and, far worse, all manner of convivial 

1680 Maecenases, liovered round him in his retreat ; and his good 
as well as his weak qualities secured them influence over 
him. He was flattered by their notice; and his warm social 
nature made it impossible for him to shake them off, and 
hold on his way apart from them. These men, as we 

1685 believe, were proximately the means of his ruin. Not that 
they meant him any ill; they only meant themselves a 
little good; if he suffered harm, let Mm look to it! But 
they wasted his precious time and his precious talent ; they 
disturbed his composure, broke down his returning habits 

1690 of temperance and assiduous contented exertion. Their 
pampering was baneful to him ; their cruelty, which soon 
followed, was equally baneful. The old grudge against 
Fortune's inequality awoke with new bitterness in their 
neighbourhood ; and Burns had no retreat but to '' the 

1695 Rock of Independence,'^ which is but an air-castle after 
all, that looks well at a distance, but will screen no one 
from real wind and wet. Flushed with irregular excite- 
ment, exasperated alternately by contempt of others, and 
contempt of himself. Burns was no longer regaining his 

1700 peace of mind, but fast losing it forever. There was a 
hollowness at the heart of his life, for his conscience did 
not now approve what he was doing. 

57. Amid the vapours of unwise enjoyment, of bootless 
remorse, and angry discontent with Fate, his true loadstar, 

saw a man employed in angling, of a singular appearance. He had a cap 
made of fox-skin on his head, a loose greatcoat fixed round him by a belt, 
from which depended an enormous Highland broad-sword. It was Burns." 
Now, we rather think, it was not Burns. For to say nothing of the fox- 
skin cap, the loose and quite Hibernian watchcoat with the belt, what are 
we to make of this " enormous Highland broad-sword " depending from 
him ? More especially as there is no word of parish constables on the 
outlook to see whether, as Dennis phrases it, he had an eye to his own 
midriff or that of the public! Burns, of all men, had the least need, and 
the least tendency, to seek for distinction, either in his own eyes, or those 
of others, by such poor mummeries. — Carlyle's note. 



50 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

1705 a life of Poetry, with Poverty, nay with Famine if it must 
be so, was too often altogether hidden from his eyes. And 
yet he sailed- a sea, where without some such loadstar there 
was no right steering. Meteors of French Politics rise 
before him, but these were not his stars. An accident 

1710 this, which hastened, but did not originate, his worst dis- 
tresses. In the mad contentions of that time, he comes 
in collision with certain official Superiors ; is wounded by 
them; cruelly lacerated, we should say, could a dead me- 
chanical implement, in any case, be called cruel : and 

1715 shrinks, in indignant pain, into deeper self -seclusion, into 
gloomier moodiness than ever. His life has now lost its 
unity : it is a life of fragments ; led with little aim, be- 
yond the melancholy one of securing its own continu- 
ance, — in tits of wild false joy when such offered, and of 

1720 black despondency when they passed away. His char- 
acter before the world begins to suffer : calumny is busy 
with him; for a miserable man makes more enemies than 
friends. Some faults he has fallen into, and a tliousand 
misfortunes ; but deep criminality is what he stands ac- 

1725 cused of, and they that are not without sin cast the first 
stone at him ! For is he not a well-wisher to the French 
Revolution, a Jacobin, and therefore in that one act guilty 
of all ? These accusations, political and moral, it has since 
appeared, were false enough : but the world hesitated little 

1730 to credit them. ]^ay his convivial Maecenases themselves 
were not the last to do it. There is reason to believe that, 
in his later years, the Dumfries Aristocracy had partly 
withdrawn themselves from Burns, as from, a tainted per- 
son, no longer worthy of their acquaintance. That painful 

1735 class, stationed in all provincial cities, behind the outmost 
breastwork of Gentility, there to stand siege and do battle 
against the intrusions of Grocerdom and Grazierdom, had 
actually seen dishonour in the society of Burns, and branded 
him with their veto ; had, as we vulgarly say, cut him ! We 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 51 

1740 find one passage in this work of Mr. Lockhart's, which, will 
not out of our thoughts : 

58. "A gentleman of that county, whose name I have already- 
more than once had occasion to refer to, has often told me that he 
was seldom more grieved, than when riding into Dumfries one fine 

1745 summer evening about this time to attend a county ball, he saw Burns 
walking alone, on the shady side of the principal street of the town, 
while the opposite side was gay with successive groups of gentlemen 
and ladies, all drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one 
of whom appeared willing to recognise him. The horseman dis- 

1750 mounted, and joined Burns, who on his proposing to cross the street 
said : ' Nay, nay, my young friend, that's all over now ; ' and quoted, 
after a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie's pathetic ballad ; 

* His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow. 
His auld ane look'd better than mony ane's new ; 
1755 But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing, 

And casts himsell dowie upon the corn-bing. 

O, were we young as we ance hae been. 
We sud hae been gallopping down on yon green, 
And linking it ower the lily-white lea ! 
1760 And werena my heart lights I wad die.^ 

It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certain subjects 
escape in this fashion. He, immediately after reciting these verses, 
assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner ; and taking his 
young friend home with him, entertained him very agreeably till the 
1765 hour of the ball arrived." 

59. Alas ! when we think that Burns now sleeps '' where 
bitter indignation can no longer lacerate his heart/' ^ and 
that most of those fair dames and frizzled gentlemen already 
lie at his side, where the breastwork of gentility is quite 

1770 thrown down, -^ who would not sigh over the thin delusions 
and foolish toys that divide heart from heart, and make 
man unmerciful to his brother. 

60. It was not now to be hoped that the genius of Burns 

1 Ubi sssva indignatio cor ulterius laeerare nequit. Swift's Epitaph. 
— Carlyle's note. 



52 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

would ever reach maturity, or accomplish aught worthy of 

1775 itself. His spirit was jarred in its melody; not the soft 
breath of natural feeling, but the rude hand of Fate, was 
now sweeping over the strings. And yet what harmony 
was in him, what music even in his discords ! How the 
wild tones jiad a charm for the simplest and the wisest ; 

1780 and all in^ felt and knew that here also was one of the 
Gifted ! "If he entered an inn at midnight, after all the 
inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from 
the cellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, 
the landlord and all his guesfe were assembled ! '' Some 

1785 brief pure moments of poetic life were yet appointed him, 
in the composition of his Songs. We can understand how 
he grasped at this employment ; and how too, he spurned 
all other reward for it but what the labour itself brought 
him. For the soul of Burns, though scathed and marred, 

1790 was yet living in its full moral strength, though sharply 
conscious of its errors and abasement: and here, in his 
destitution and degradation, was one act of seeming noble- 
ness and self-devotedness left even for him to perform. 
He felt too, that with all the "thoughtless follies'' that had 

1795 " laid him low,'' the world was unjust and cruel to him ; and 
he silently appealed to another and calmer time. Not as a 
hired soldier, but as a patriot, would he strive for the glory 
of his country : so he cast from him the poor sixpence a-day, 
and served zealously as a volunteer. Let us not grudge him 

1800 this last luxury of his existence ; let him not have appealed 
to us in vain ! The money was not necessary to him ; he 
struggled through without it : long since, these guineas 
would have been gone, and now the high-mindedness of 
refusing them will plead for him in all hearts forever. 

1805 61. AVe are here arrived at the crisis of Burns's life; for 
matters had now taken such a shape with him as could not 
long continue. If improvement was not to be looked for, 
Nature could only for a limited time maintain this dark 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 63 

and maddening warfare against the world and itself. We 

1810 are not medically informed whether any continuance of 
years was, at this period, probable for Burns ; whether his 
death is to be looked on as in some sense an accidental 
event, or only as the natural /onsequence of the long series 
of events that had precedm. The latter seems to be the 

1815 likelier opinion ; and yet it is by no means a certain one. 
At all events, as we have said, some change could not be 
very distant. Three gates of deliverance, it seems to us, 
were open for Burns : clear poetical activity ; madness ; or 
death. The first, with longer life, was still possible, though 

1820 not probable ; for physical causes were beginliing to be con- 
cerned in it : and yet Burns had an iron resolution ; could 
he but have seen and felt, that not only his highest glory, 
but his first duty, and the true medicine for all his woes, lay 
here. The second was still less probable ; for his mind was 

1825 ever among the clearest and firmest. So the milder third 
gate was opened for him : and he passed, not softly yet 
speedily, into that still country, where the hail-storms and 
fire-showers do not reach, and the heaviest-laden wayfarer 
at length lays down his load ! 

1830 62. Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he 
sank unaided by any real help, uncheered by any wise sym- 
pathy, generous minds have sometimes figured to themselves, 
with a reproachful sorrow, that much might have been done 
for him ; that by counsel, true affection and friendly minis- 

1835 trations, he might have been saved to himself and the world. 
We question whether there is not more tenderness of heart 
than soundness of judgment in these suggestions. It seems 
dubious to us whether the richest, wisest, most benevolent 
individual could have lent Burns any effectual help. Coun- 

1840 sel, which seldom profits any one, he did not need ; in his 
understanding, he knew the right from the wrong, as well 
perhaps as any man ever did; but the persuasion, which 



54 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

would have availed him, lies not so much in the head as in 
the heart, where no argument or expostulation could have 

1845 assisted much to implant it. As to money again, we do not 
believe that this was his essential want ; or well see how 
any private man could, even presupposing Burns's consent, 
have bestowed on him an independent fortune, with much 
prospect of decisive advantage. It is a mortifying truth, 

1850 that two men in any rank of society, could hardly be found 
virtuous enough to give money, and to take it as a necessary 
gift, without injury to the moral entireness of one or both. 
But so stands the fact : Friendship, in the old heroic sense 
of that term, no longer exists ; except in the cases of kin- 

1855 dred or other legal affinity, it is in reality no longer 
expected, or recognised as a virtue among men. A close 
observer of manners has pronounced ^^ Patronage," that is, 
pecuniary or other economic furtherance, to be " twice 
cursed;" cursing him that gives, and him that takes! And 

I860 thus, in regard to outward matters also, it has become the 
rule, as in regard to inward it always was and must be the 
rule, that no one shall look for effectual help to another; 
but that each shall rest contented with what help he can 
afford himself. Such, we say, is the principle of modern 

1865 Honour ; naturally enough growing out of that sentiment of 
Pride, which we inculcate and encourage as the basis of our 
whole social morality. Many a poet has been poorer than 
Burns ; but no one was ever prouder : we may question 
whether, without great precavitions, even a pension from 

1870 Royalty would not have galled and encumbered, more than 
actually assisted him. 

/\ 63. Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with an- 
other class of Burns's admirers, who accuse the higher ranks 
among us of having ruined Burns by their selfish neglect of 

1875 him. We have already stated our doubts whether direct 
pecuniary help, had it been offered, would have been ac- 
cepted, or could have proved very effectual. We shall 



CARLYLE^S ESSAY ON BURNS 55 

readily admit, however, that much was to be done for 
Burns ; that many a poisoned arrow might have been 

1880 warded from his bosom ; many an entanglement in his 
path cut asunder by the hand of the powerful ; and light 
and heat, shed on him from high places, would have made 
his humble atmosphere more genial ; and the softest heart 
then breathing might have lived and died with some 

1885 fewer pangs. ISTay, we shall grant farther, and for Burns 
it is granting much, that, with all his pride, he would have 
thanked, even with exaggerated gratitude, any one who had 
cordially befriended him : patronage, unless once cursed, 
needed not to have been twice so. At all events, the poor 

1890 promotion he desired in his calling might have been granted: 
it was his own scheme, therefore likelier than any other to 
be of service. All this it might have been a luxury, nay it 
was a duty, for our nobility to have done. No part of all 
this, however, did any of them do ; or apparently attempt, 

1895 or wish to do : so much is granted against them. But what 
then is the amount of their blame ? Simply that they were 
men of the world, and walked by the principles of such 
men; that they treated Burns, as other nobles and other 
commoners had done other poets ; as the English did Shak- 

1900 speare ; as King Charles and his Cavaliers did Butler, as 
King Philip and his Grandees did Cervantes. Do men 
gather grapes of thorns ; or shall we cut down our thorns 
for, yielding only di fence and haws? Howf indeed, could 
the " nobility and gentry of his native land " hold out any 

1905 help to this '^ Scottish Bard, proud of his name and coun- 
try " ? Were the nobility and gentry so much as able 
rightly to help themselves ? Had they not their game to 
preserve ; their borough interests to strengthen ; dinners, 
therefore, of various kinds to eat and give ? Were their 

1910 means more than adequate to all this business, or less than 
adequate ? Less than adequate, in general ; few of them 
in reality were richer than Burns; many of them were 



56 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

poorer ; for sometimes they had to wring their supplies, as 
with thumbscrews, from the hard hand ; and, in their need 

1915 of guineas, to forget their duty of mercy ; Avhich Burns was 
never reduced to do. Let us pity and forgive them. The 
game they preserved and shot, the dinners they ate and 
gave, the borough interests they strengthened, the little 
Babylons they severally builded by the glory of their might, 

1920 are all melted or melting back into the primeval Chaos, as 
man's merely selfish endeavours are fated to do : and here 
was an action, extending, in virtue of its worldly influence, 
we may say, through all time ; in virtue of its moral nature, 
beyond all time, being immortal as the Spirit of Goodness 

1925 itself; this action was offered them to do, and light was not 
given them to do it. Let us pity and forgive them. But 

,\ better than pity, let us go and do otherwise,^^^J^Vi\\\2i\\ suffer- 
ing did not end with the life of Burns ; neither was the 
solemn mandate, ^^Love one another, bear one another's 

1930 burdens," given to the rich only, but to all men.^i True, we 

shall find no Burns to relieve, to assuage by our aid or our 

pity ; but celestial natures, groaning under the fardels of a 

w:eary life, we shall still find ; and that wretchedness which 

I^^Fate has rendered voteless and tuneless is not the least 

19:^ wretched, but the mostTj 

^5 64. Still, we do not think that the blame of Burns's fail- 
ure lies chiefly with the world. The world, it seems to us, 
treated him wtth more rather than with less kindness than 
it usually shows to such men. It has ever, we fear, shown 

1940 but small favour to its Teachers : hunger and nakedness, 
perils and revilings, the prison, the cross, the poison-chalice 
have, in most times and countries, been the market-price 
it has offered for Wisdom, the welcome with which it has 
greeted those who have come to enlighten and purify it. 

1945 Homer and Socrates, and the Christian Apostles, belong to 
old days ; but the world's Martyrology was not completed 
with these. Roger Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 57 

dungeons ; Tasso pines in the cell of a madhouse ; Camoens 
dies begging on the streets of Lisbon. So neglected, so 

i\)dO " persecuted they the Prophets/' not in Judea only, but in 
all places where men have been. We reckon that every 
poet of Burns's order is, or should be, a prophet and teacher 
to his age ; that he has no right to expect great kindness 
from it, but rather is bound to do it great kindness ; that 

1955 Burns, in particular, experienced fully the usual proportion 
of the world's goodness ; and that the blame of his failure, 
as we have said, lies not chiefly with the world. 

65. Where, then, does it lie ? We are forced to answer : 
With himself; it is his inward, not his outward misfortunes 

if)60 that bring him to the dust. Seldom, indeed, is it otherwise ; 
seldom is a life morally wrecked but the grand cause lies in 
some internal mal-arrangement, some want less of good for- 
tune than of good guidance. Nature fashions no creature 
without implanting in it the strength needful for its action 

19G5 and duration ; least of all does she so neglect her master- 
piece and darling, the poetic soul. Neither can we believe 
that it is in the power of aiiy external circumstances utterly 
to ruin the mind of a man ; nay if proper wisdom be given 
him, even so much as to affect its essential health and beauty. 

1970 The sternest sum-total of all worldly misfortunes is Death ; 
nothing more can lie in the cup of human woe : yet many 
men, in all ages, have triumphed over Death, and led it 
captive ; converting its physical victory into a moral victory 
for themselves, into a seal and immortal consecration for 

1975 all that their past life had achieved. What has been done, 
may be done again : nay, it is but the degree and not the 
kind of such heroism that differs in different seasons : for 
without some portion of this spirit, not of boisterous daring, 
but of silent fearlessness, of Self-denial in all its forms, no 

1980 good man, in any scene or time, has ever attained to be 
good. 

66, We have already stated the error of Burns ; and 



68 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

mourned over it rather than blamed it. It was the want 
of unity in his purposes, of consistency in his aims; the 

1985 hapless attempt to mingle in friendly union the common 
spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, which is of a 
far different and altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns 
was nothing wholly, and Burns could be nothing, no man 
formed as he was can be anything, by halves. The heart, 

1990 not of a mere hot-blooded, popular Versemonger, or poetical 
Restaurateur, but of a true Poet and Singer, worthy of the 
old religious heroic times, had been given him : and he fell 
in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of scepticism, 
selfishness and triviality, when true Nobleness was little 

1995 understood, and its place supplied by a hollow, dissocial, 
altogether barren and unfruitful principle of Pride. The 
influences of that age, his open, kind, susceptible nature, 
to say nothing of his highly untoward situation, made it 
more than usually difficult for him to cast aside, or rightly 

2000 subordinate ; the better spirit that was within him ever 
sternly demanded its rights, its supremacy : he spent his 
life in endeavouring to reconcile these two ; and lost it, as 
he must lose it, without reconciling them. 

67. Burns was born poor; and born also to continue 

2005 poor, for he would not endeavour to be otherwise : this it 
had been well could he have once for all admitted, and 
considered as finally settled. He was poor, truly ; but hun- 
dreds even of his own class and order of minds have been 
poorer, yet have suffered nothing deadly from it : nay, his 

2010 own Father had a far sorer battle with ungrateful destiny 
than his was ; and he did not yield to it, but died courage- 
ously warring, and to all moral intents prevailing, against 
it. True, Burns had little means, had even little time for 
poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation ; but so much the 

2015 more precious was what little he had. In all these external 
respects his case was hard ; but very far from the hardest. 
Poverty, incessant drudgery and much worse evils, it has 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 59 

often been the lot of Poets and wise men to strive with, 
and their glory to conquer. Locke was banished as a traitor ; 

2020 and wrote his Essay on the Human Understanding, sheltering 
himself in a Dutch garret. Was Milton rich or at his ease 
when he composed Paradise Lost f Not only low, but fallen 
from a height ; not only poor, but impoverished ; in dark- 
ness and with dangers compassed round, he sang his im- 

2025 mortal song, and found fit audience, though few. Did not 
Cervantes finish his work, a maimed soldier and in prison ? 
Nay, was not the Araucana, which Spain acknowledges as 
its Epic, written without even the aid of paper ; on scraps 
of leather, as the stout fighter and voyager snatched any 

2030 moment from that wild warfare ? 

68, And what, then, had these men, Avhich Burns wanted ? 
Two things ; both which, it seems to us, are indispensable 
for such men. They had a true, religious principle of 
morals; and a single, not a double aim in their activity. 

2035 They were not self-seekers and self-worshippers ; but seekers 
and worshippers of something far better than Self. Not 
personal enjoyment was their object ; but a high, heroic idea 
of Eeligion, of Patriotism, of heavenly Wisdom, in one or 
the other form, ever hovered before them ; in which cause 

2040 they neither shrank from suffering, nor called on the earth 
to witness it as something wonderful ; but patiently endured, 
counting it blessedness enough so to spend and be spent. 
Thus the ^^golden-calf of Self-love,'' however curiously 
carved, was not their Deity; but the invisible Goodness, 

2045 which alone is man's reasonable service. This feeling was 
as a celestial fountain, whose streams refreshed into glad- 
ness and beauty all the provinces of their otherwise too deso- 
late existence. In a word, they willed one thing, to which 
all other things were subordinated and made subservient ; 

2050 and therefore they accomplished it. The wedge will rend 
rocks; but its edge must be sharp and single: if it be 
double, the wedge is bruised in pieces and will rend nothing. 



60 CAPvLYLE^S ESSAY ON BURNS 

69. Part of this superiority these men owed to their age ; 
in which heroism and devotedness were still practised, or 

2055 at least not yet disbelieved in : but much of it likewise 
they owed to themselves. With Burns, again, it was dif- 
ferent. His morality, in most of its practical points, is 
that of a mere worldly man; enjoyment, in a finer or 
coarser shape, is the only thing he longs and strives for. 

2060 A noble instinct sometimes raises him above this; but an 
instinct only, and acting only for moments. He has no 
Eeligion; in the shallow age, where his days were cast, 
Eeligion was not discriminated from the New and Old 
Light forms of Eeligion; and was, with these, becoming 

2065 obsolete in the minds of men. His heart, indeed, is alive 
with a trembling adoration, but there is no temple in his 
understanding. He lives in darkness and in the shadow of 
doubt. His religion, at best, is an anxious wish ; like that 
of Eabelais, " a great Perhaps." 

2070 70. He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart ; could he 
but have loved it purely, and with his whole undivided 
heart, it had been well. For Poetry, as Burns could have 
followed it, is but another form of Wisdom, of Eeligion; 
is itself Wisdom and Eeligion. But this also was denied 

2075 him. His poetr}^ is a stray vagrant gleam, which will not 
be extinguished within him, yet rises not to be the true 
light of his path, but is often a wildfire that misleads him. 
It was not necessary for Burns to be rich, to be, or to seem, 
" independent ; " but it ivas necessary for him to be at one 

2080 with his own heart ; to place what was highest in his na- 
ture highest also in his life ; " to seek within himself for 
that consistency and sequence, which external events would 
forever refuse him." He was born a poet ; poetry was the 
celestial element of his being, and should have been the 

2085 soul of his whole endeavours. Lifted into that serene 
ether, whither he had wings given him to mount, he would 
have needed no other elevation: poverty, neglect and all 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 61 

evil, save the desecration of himself and his Art, were a 
small matter to him; the pride and the passions of the 

2090 world lay far beneath his feet ; and he looked down alike 
on noble and slave, on prince and beggar, and all that wore 
the stamp of man, with clear recognition, with brotherly- 
affection, with sympathy, with pity. Nay, we question 
whether for his culture as a Poet poverty and much suffer- 

2095 ing for a season were not absolutely advantageous. Great 
men, in looking back over their lives, have testified to that 
effect. " I would not for much,'^ says Jean Paul, " that I 
had been born richer." And yet Paul's birth was poor 
enough ; for, in another place, he' adds : -' The prisoner's 

2100 allowance is bread and water ; and I had often only the 
latter." But the gold that is refined in the hottest furnace 
comes out the purest; or, as he has himself expressed it, 
" the canary-bird sings sweeter the longer it has been 
trained in a darkened cage." 

2105 71. A man like Burns might have divided his hours 
between poetry and virtuous industry ; industry which all 
true feeling sanctions, nay prescribes, and which has a 
beauty, for that cause, beyond the pomp of thrones : but to 
divide his hours between poetry and rich men's banquets 

2110 was an ill-starred and inauspicious attempt. How could he 
be at ease at such banquets? What had he to do there, 
mingling his music with the coarse roar of altogether 
earthly voices ; brightening the thick smoke of intoxication 
w^ith fire lent him from heaven ? Was it his aim to enjoy 

2115 life ? To-morrow he must go drudge as an Exciseman ! We 
wonder not that Burns became moody, indignant, and at 
times an offender against certain rules of society ; but rather 
that he did not grow utterly frantic, and run amuck against 
them all. How could a man, so falsely placed, by his own 

2120 or others' fault, ever know contentment or peaceable dili- 
gence for an hour ? What he did, under such perverse 
guidance, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with aston- 



62 CAELYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

ishment at the natural strength and worth of his char- 
acter. 

2125 72. Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness ; 
but not in others ; only in himself ; least of all in simple 
increase of wealth and worldly " respectability.'' We hope 
we have now heard enough about the efficacy of wealth for 
poetry, and to make poets happy. Nay have we not seen 

2130 another instance of it in these very days ? Byron, a man 
of an endowment considerably less ethereal than that of 
Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, 
but of an English peer : the highest worldly honours, the 
fairest worldly career, are his by inheritance ; the richest 

2135 harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another province, by his 
own hand. And what does all this avail him ? Is he happy, 
is he good, is he true ? Alas, he has a poet's soul, and 
strives towards the Infinite and the Eternal ; and soon feels 
that all this is but mounting to the house-top to reach the 

2140 stars ! Like Burns, he is only a proud man ; might, like 
him, have " purchased a pocket-copy of Milton to study the 
character of Satan ; " for Satan also is Byron's grand exem- 
plar, the hero of his poetry, and the model apparently of his 
conduct. As in Burns's case too, the celestial element will 

2145 not mingle with the clay of earth ; both poet and man of 
the world he must not be ; vulgar Ambition will not live 
kindly with poetic Adoration ; he cannot serve God and 
Mammon. Byron, like Burns, is not happy ; nay he is the 
most wretched of all men. His life is falsely arranged : the 

2150 fire that is in him is not a strong, still, central fire, warming 
into beauty the products of a world ; but it is the mad fire 
of a volcano ; and now — we look sadly into the ashes of the 
crater, which ere long will fill itself with snow ! 

73. Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries 

2155 to their generation, to teach it a higher Doctrine, a purer 
Truth ; they had a message to deliver, which left them no 
rest till it was accomplished ; in dim throes of pain, this 

^ 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 63 

divine behest lay smouldering within them ; for they knew 
not what it meant, and felt it only in mysterious anticipa- 

2160 tion, and they had to die without articulately uttering it. 
They are in the camp of the Unconverted ; yet not as high 
messengers of rigorous though benignant truth, but as soft 
flattering singers, and in pleasant fellowship will they live 
there : they are first adulated, then persecuted ; they accom- 

2165 plish little for others ; they find no peace for themselves, 
but only death and the peace of the grave. We confess, it 
is not without a certain mournful awe that we view the fate 
of these noble souls, so richly gifted, yet ruined to so little 
purpose with all their gifts. It seems to us there is a stern 

2170 moral taught in this piece of history, — twice told us in our 
own time ! Surely to men of like genius, if there be any 
such, it carries with it a lesson of deep impressive signifi- 
cance. Surely it would become such a man, furnished for 
the highest of all enterprises, that of being the Poet of his 

2175 Age, to consider well what it is that he attempts, and in 
what spirit he attempts it. For the words of Milton are true 
in all times, and were never truer than in this : " He who 
would write heroic poems must make his whole life a heroic 
poem.'' If he cannot first so make his life, then let him 

2180 hasten from this arena ; for neither its lofty glories, nor its 
fearful perils, are fit for him. Let him dwindle into a mod- 
ish balladmonger ; let him worship and besing the idols of 
the time, and the time will not fail to reward him. If, 
indeed, he can endure to live in that capacity ! Byron and 

2185 Burns could not live as idol-priests, but the fire of their own 
hearts consumed them ; ^nd better it was for them that they 

' could* not. For it is not in the favour of the great or of the 
small, but in a life of truth, and in the inexpugnable citadel 
of his own soul, that a Byron's or a Burns's strength must 

2190 lie. Let the great stand aloof from him, or know how to 
reverence him. Beautiful is the union of wealth with favour 
and furtherance for literature; like the costliest flower-jar 



64 CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 

enclosing the loveliest amaranth. Yet let not the relation 
be mistaken. A true poet is not one whom they can hire by 

2195 money or flattery to be a minister of their pleasures, their 
writer of occasional verses, their purveyor of table-wit ; he 
cannot be their menial, he cannot even be their partisan. 
At the peril of both parties, let no such union be attempted ! 
Will a Courser of the Sun work softly in the harness of a 

2200 Dray-horse ? His hoofs are of fire, and his path is through 
the heavens, bringing light to all lands ; will he lumber on 
mud highways, dragging ale for earthly appetites from door 
to door ? 

74. But we must stop short in these considerations, which 

2205 would lead us to boundless lengths. We had something to 
say on the public moral character of Burns ; but this also 
we must forbear. We are far from regarding him as guilty 
before the world, as guiltier than the average ; nay from 
doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten thousand. 

2210 Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that where the 
Plehiscitxi of common civic reputations are pronounced, he 
has seemed to us even there less worthy of blame than of 
pity and wonder. But the world is habitually unjust in its 
judgments of such men ; unjust on many grounds, of which 

2215 this one may be stated as the substance : It decides, like a 
' court of law, by dead statutes ; and not positively but nega- 
tively, less on what is done right, than on what is or is not 
done wrong. Not the few inches of deflection from the 
mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the 

2220 ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real 
aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the 
breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippo- 
drome ; nay the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of 
feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are meas- 

2225 ured : and it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, 
^ and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when com- 
pared with them ! Here lies the root of many a blind, cruel 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON BURNS 65 

condemnation of Biirnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one 
never listens to with appro vah Granted, the ship comes 

2230 into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged ; the pilot is 
blameworthy ; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful : 
but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his 
voyage has been round the Globe, or only to Ramsgate and 
the Isle of Dogs. 

2235 75. With our readers in general, with men of right feel- 
ing anywhere, we are not required to plead for Burns. In 
pitying admiration he lies enshrined in all our hearts, in a 
far nobler mausoleum than that one of marble ; neither will 
his Works, even as they are, pass away from the memory of 

2240 men. T^Vhile the Shakspeares and Miltons roll on like 
mighty rivers through the country of Thought, bearing 
fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on their v^^ 
waves ; this little Valclusa Fountain will also arrest our 
eye : for this also is of Nature's own and most cunning 

2245 workmanship, bursts from the depths of the earth, with a 
full gushing current, into the light of day ; and often will 
the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and 
muse among its rocks and pines ! 



NOTES 

I. SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY 

The ultimate object in the study of all literature is the devel- 
opment of character and the increase, which comes through the 
sympathetic understanding and enjoyment of what certain people- 
have had to say to the world, of one's own happiness, and, through 
that, of one's own power of self-expression — the production of other 
literature, in short. The more immediate object of the reading of 
such an essay as the present is, with of course the same ultimate 
aim, to gain a pretty exact knowledge (1) of just what Carlyle 
means in his talk about Barns, (2) of the manner in which Carlyle 
has brought home and made vivid his meaning, and, (3) most 
important, of the peculiar way he had of looking at things, the 
traits of his character and the strength of his vision which caused 
him to speak of Burns as he has done. If a student has gained a 
fair idea of these points, he will have an acquaintance of all that is 
really essential in the essay, and will have a sound method for 
future literary study. 

In aiding students to obtain this knowledge of the detail of the 
essay and of the writer's point of view, the teacher will naturally 
pursue the method which suits him best. In any case, however, a 
sound understanding of what one might call the language and facts 
of the essay should precede further inquiry. The essay should be 
read through as a whole, first ; then the student should see that he 
understands the detail. It is to this end that the Explanatory 
Notes immediately following are introduced. As an aid to the 
comprehending of the larger aspects of the essay, its arrangement 
as a whole, its style, and its most important feature, the expression 
of Carlyle's personality, these notes are followed by Questions on the 
Essay, and, for those students who care to pursue the subject more 
deeply, by a Bibliography. These the teacher should use at his 
discretion. If the essay is wholly intelligible without such aids to 
reflection, they had better remain in the background. The Appen- 

67 



68 NOTES 

dix contains selections from the poems of Burns, to enable a student 
to gather his own impressions. The Introduction may be read at 
the start to clear up the ground. 

It may be added that a good plan for testing the student's grasp of 
the essay is the writing, in class, so far as time allows, of paragraphs 
and short essays dealing with various topics taken from the text. 
These may have to do with the meaning of words, the conduct of 
sentences and paragraphs, the facts of Burns's life, the principles 
of Carlyle, and the like. A careful reading of the essay as a whole 
is, however, to be insisted on as the necessary prelude to all such 
exercise. In a word, (1) let the student strive to gain a knowl- 
edge of the essay as a whole, with whatever is necessary to his 
understanding of the circumstances of its composition ; (2) then 
let him master the details and the significance of them ; finally, 
(3) let his knowledge be tested by whatever method is most 
available. 

II. EXPLANATORY NOTES 

2 Butler. Samuel Butler (1612-1680), the author of HucUbras, 
a satirical poem. The referenqe is to the unfulfilled prom- 
ises made him by Charles II as a reward for his poem. 
He died in poverty seventeen years after its publication. 
6 The inventor of a spinning-jenny. James Hargreaves, who 
invented this very useful machine in 1767, found himself, 
contrary to Carlyle's dictum, involved in lawsuits because 
of his invention. 

11 Might yet have been living. Burns would have been less 
than seventy years old. 

14 Brave mausoleum. At Dumfries. Brave is used in the rather 
obsolete sense of splendid^ making a fine shotc, and is here 
ironical. Lockhart says, Ch. IX, that the structure '^ is per- 
haps more gaudy than one might have wished.'* 

17 The highest personages in our literature. In the literature of 
Scotland. The phrase is obviously ironical ; see the fol- 
lowing clauses of the sentence. 

19 The sixth narrative. Before Lockhart, there had been, in 
addition to various criticisms of the poet, lives by Heron 
(1797), Currie (1800), Irving (1804), Walker (1811), Peter- 
kin (1815), and Hamilton Paul (1819). 



EXPLANATORY NOTES 69 

21 Lockhart. John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) was Sir Walter 
Scott's son-in-law and author of the famous life of Scott, 
one of the most notable biographies in English. 

37 Sir Thomas Lucy. Lucy was a country squire, proprietor of 
Charlecote near Stratford, from whom Shakspere is said 
to have stolen deer, an offc'ense for which the poet was cited. 
John a Combe. A wealthy neighbor of Shakspere, near 
Stratford. 

44 Bowels. Compare the phrase '' bowels of compassion." Now- 
adays we say heart. 

46-50 Many of these apparent titles are due merely to Carlyle's 
liking for capital letters. 

47 Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt. The Caledonian Hunt 
was a society of Scotch nobility and gentry established to 
promote field sports. They had subscribed for Burns's 
poems, and to them he dedicated the second, or Edinburgh 
edition, of his poems. 

49 Ayr Writers. The lawyers, solicitors, and possibly their 
clerks of the town of Ayr. The New and Old Light Clergy. 
Respectively the moderate and the evangelical parties into 
which the Church of Scotland was divided. See Introduc- 
tion, Note on the Life of Burns. 

95 Constable's Miscellany. Archibald Constable, the first pub- 
lisher of the Edinburgh Review, the man whose failure in 
1826 involved Scott, was the originator, on a large scale, in 
his Miscellany of Original and Selected Publications in Litera- 
ture, Science, and the Arts, of the modern scheme of cheap 
popular editions of good pieces of literature. 
100 Nervous, having spirit, force, vitality. 

104 Morris Birkbeck. Author of Notes on a Journey in America 
from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of Illinois (1818), 
and Letters from Illinois (1818). 
107 But there are better things than these in the volume, etc. Pro- 
fessor Noyes points out that this was not Carlyle's first 
opinion, and cites a letter of Carlyle to his brother, dated 
June 10, 1828: ''Lockhart had written a kind of life of 
Burns, and men in general were making another uproar 
about Burns; it is this book (a trivial enough one) that I 
am to pretend reviewing." 



70 NOTES 

149 Nine days. An allusion to the phrase a " nine days' wonder," 
at least as old as Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. 

178 Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen. Com- 
pare Note on the Life of Burns, Introduction. 

184 Ferguson. Robert Ferguson (1750-1774). Ramsay. Allan 
Ramsay (1686-1758), author of pastoral poems of which the 
best known is The Gentle Shepherd (1725). These two pre- 
cursors of Burns had considerable influence on him, and 
Ferguson directly stimulated him to write several of his 
best-known poems. Apparently Burns thought more 
highly of these poets than did Carlyle. He spoke of them 
as "The excellent Ramsay, and the still more excellent 
Ferguson." — Commonplace Book, August, 1784. 

220 Sir Hudson Lowe. Lowe was governor of St. Helena during 
the captivity of Xapoleon on that island (1815-1821). 

254 The Daisy. For the poem To a Mountain Daisy ^ see Appendix, 
p. 89. 

256 Wee, cowering, timorous beastie. For the poem To a Mouse, 
see Appendix, p. 91. 

258 The hoar visage of Winter. Compare "In . o . the hoary 

majesty of winter, the poet feels a charm unknown to the 
most of his species." Letter of Burns to Miss Kennedy, 1785. 

259 He dwells with a sad and oft-returning fondness, etc. Compare 

for the inspiration of this passage the words from Burns's 
Commonplace Book, April, 1784 : " There is scarcely any 
earthly object gives me more — I don't know if I should 
call it pleasure, but something which exalts me, something 
which enraptures me — than to walk in the sheltered side 
of a wood or high plantation, in a cloudy, winter day, and 
hear a stormy wind howling among the trees and raving 
o'er the plain. It is my best season for devotion ; my mind 
is rapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to Him who, in the 
pompous language of Scripture, ' Walks on the wrings of the 
wind.' " It was under such circumstances. Burns tells us, 
that he composed the dirge Winter. The italics of the pas- 
sage are from Psalm civ. 
271 Arcadian. Arcadia was the central and inland province of 
the Peloponnesus, a province famed in literature, as for 
example in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, for the pastoral 



EXPLANATOKY NOTES 71 

simplicity and charm of its life. The allusion here is to 
the fact that Burns lived in the reality, not the poet's 
dream, of peasant life. 

304 A soul like an -aEolian harp, etc. Compare 778, a favorite fig- 
ure apparently. 

306 And this was he, etc. See Introduction, Note on the Life 
of Burns. 

329 The wildest vicissitudes in poetic taste. Compare what Car- 
lyle says of Keats, 725. 

362 Si vis me Here. Compare Horace, Ars Poetica, 102-103 : — 

'' Si vis me flere, dolendum est 
Primum ipsi tibi." 

(If you wish me to weep, you must first mourn yourself.) 

398 Strong waters. Distilled or ardent spirits. 

400 Harolds. Harold is the hero of the narrative poem The 
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Giaours. The Giaour is a 
romantic narrative poem of Byron. 

415 Don Juan. Byron's longest and most famous poem. 

464 Mrs. Dunlop. A patriotic Scotch lady of high birth and good 
fortune who was so much attracted by Burns's poems and 
especially by The Cotter's Saturday Night that she took ex- 
press pains to assure the poet of her good-will : the result was 
a friendly correspondence which lasted till Burns's death. 

478 Rose-coloured Novels, etc., to line 485. Carlyle here attacks sen- 
timental literature of all sorts, from weak, vapid novels to 
highly colored and passionate romances. The particular 
allusions are to Southey, Moore, Scott, and Cooper, and 
possibly to some others. 

526 Vates. Soothsayer, prophet. 

529 Delphi. The chief shrine of Phoebus, the god of poetry, 
near Mt. Parnassus in Greece. 

533 Minerva Press. "A printing-house in London, which was 
noted in the eighteenth century for the publication of 
trashy sentimental novels." — Century Dictionary of Names. 

540 The elder dramatists. The Elizabethan dramatists, usually 
exclusive of Shakspere, down to the time of the so-called 
" Restoration dramatists." The reference is to the poetry 
for which these dramatists are famous. 

548 Travels from Dan to Beersheba, and finds it all barren. Liter- 



72 NOTES 

ally, from the extreme north to the extretne south of Pales- 
tine ; figuratively, from one end of the world to the other. 
557 Borgia. The Borgias were an Italian family whence came 
many cardinals and popes. The " sins of the Borgias '' 
were notorious. Carlyle probably alludes to Csesar Borgia, 
one of the ablest and most wicked of the race. Luther. 
The leader of the Protestant Reformation, a man whose 
passion was righteous indignation against evil, the opposite 
of a Borgia-like profligacy. 

560 Mossgiel and Tarbolton. See Introduction, Note on the 

Life of Burns. 

561 Crockford's. A famous gambling house in London. 

562 Tuileries. A famous French royal palace adjoining the 

Louvre, destroyed by the Commune in 187L 
565 Inasmuch as poetry . . . vanished from the earth. The 

allusion is to Macanlay's Essay on Milton (1825), wliich 

was being widely read. 
580 The Wounded Hare. See Appendix, p. 92. 
582 Halloween. See Appendix, p. 89. 

584 Druids. The priests of Britain before the occupation by the 

Romans. Theocritus. A Greek idyllic poet of about 270 B.C. 

585 Holy Fair. The poem should be read to understand the ref- 

erences which follow ; Superstition, Hypocrisy, and Fun are 
characters in it. See Appendix, p. 89. 

586 Council of Trent. The famous council held at Trent in the 

Tyro] in 1545-1563 to condemn the doctrines of the Refor- 
mation. Roman Jubilee. A festal year in the Roman Catho- 
lic Church, occurring every twenty-five or fifty years, during 
which a pilgrimage to Rome and other acts of penance could 
purchase pardon from the penal consequences of sin. 

625 Burin. The cutting tool of an engraver. Retzsch. F. A. M. 
Retzsch (1779-1857), a German painter and designer, 
whose illustrations of Goethe and Schiller probably were 
what attracted Carlyle to him. 

631 Winter Night. See Appendix, p. 89. Fell, keen. Doure, 
stern. Glowr, stare. Lift, sky. 'Ae, one. Burns, rivulets. 
Boch'd, belched. 

653 Auld Brig. From Burns's poem, The Brigs of Ayr. See Ap- 
pendix, p. 89. T//o?r6.s% thaws. Snaiv-broo rowes, ^i\o^'-hvot\i 



EXPLANATORY NOTES 73 

rolls. Speat, flood. A' to the gate, out of the way. Gurnlie 
jaupSy muddy splashing waves. 

659 Haunted Garpal . . . Fabulosus Hydaspes. Storied Hydaspes. 
The Hydaspes (modern Jhelam), a river between the Indus 
and the Ganges, marked the eastern limit of Alexander's 
conquests. The phrase, from the Odes of Horace, I, 22, 
suggested itself to Carlyle as parallel to '' haunted Garpal." 

668 Poussin. Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665), a French painter of 
landscapes. 

672 Farmer^s and Auld Mare. See Appendix, p. 89. 

674 Smithy of the Cyclops. For the story of Odysseus and his 

adventures with the thunderbolt-forging Cyclops of Mt. 
Etna and the giant Polyphemus, see Homer's Odyssey, Book 
IX. Yoking of Priam^s Chariot. See Iliad, Book XXIV. 

675 Burn-the-wind. The Scotch name for blacksmith in the 

poem Scotch Drink. See Appendix, p. 89. 
679 Songs. The special part of the poetry of Burns known as 

his Songs numbered nearly three hundred pieces. See 

Carlyle's discussion of them, pp. 30 ff. 
681 The pale Moon, etc. This is incorrectly quoted by Carlyle 

from an alteration by Burns of an Irish song. See Appendix, 

p. 93. 

692 Richardson. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), the so-called 

father of the modern English novel, author of the famous 
novel Clarissa Harloive. 

693 Defoe. Daniel Defoe (1QQI-I7dl), author oi Robinson Crusoe 

and many other stories. 

709 Red-wat-shod, red-wet-shod, with blood-stained feet. From 
the poetical Epistle to William Si7nson. See Appendix, p. 89. 

715 Professor Stewart. Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), professor 
of moral philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, who 
*' breathed the love of virtue into whole generations of 
pupils." 

725 Keats. John Keats (1795-1821), one of the very great Eng- 
lish poets. Carlyle here treats him with great lack of 
sympathy and intelligence. 

733 The Hell of Dante. See Dante's Inferno, the first of the three 
parts of his Divine Comedy. See what Macaulay in the 
Essay on Milton has to say about Dante's imagination. 



74 NOTES 

739 Novum Organum, the chief philosophical work of Francis 
Bacon (1561-1626). For an alleged relation between 
Bacon and Shakspere, see the famous Shakspere-Bacon 
controversy. Consult Poole's Index for articles. 

761 The passage above quoted. Evidently in some omitted part. 

For a word on the omitted part of Stewart's letter, see 
Lockhart, Ch. Y. 

762 Doctrine of association. The psychological doctrine of the 

combination or connection of states of mind with one 
another, or of their objects with one another, by which 
ideas and objects are recalled to mind. 

766 Thus writes he. To Mrs. Dunlop, January 1, 1789. 

818 I thought me on the ourie cattle, etc. From the poem A 
Winter Night. See Appendix, p. 89. Ourie, shivering. Silly, 
helpless. Bide, endure. Brattle, pelting. Deep-lairing, 
sinking deep. Spratile, scramble. Scaur, clift'. Ill:, every. 
Happing, hopping. Chittering, trembling. 

836 But fare you weel, etc. From the Address to the De'il. See 
Appendix, p. 89. Nickie-hen, Nick, old fellow. Men\ 
amend. Aihlins, perhaps. Dinna ken, don't know. Still 
hae a stake, still have a chance. Wae, sorry. 

842 and 844 Dr. Slop and Uncle Toby. Characters in Tristram 
Shandy, by Laurence Sterne (1713-1768). 

846 The two following paragraphs were not in the essay as 

printed in the Edinburgh Review. 

847 Indignation makes verses. Faclt indignatio vers u in. Juvenal, 

1,79. 
856 Johnson. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), author of Rasselas, 
the Lives of the Poets, and a famous dictionary. 

869 Dweller in yon Dungeon dark. From the ode Sacred to the 

Memory of Mrs. Oswald. See Appendix, p. 89. 

870 The Furies of -^schylus. The Erinyes, or, as they were called 

for the sake of propitiation, the Eumenides, were in Greek 
mythology the goddesses who avenged crime. The reference 
is to the Eumenides of ^Eschylus, one of the great Greek 
tragedians, wherein the Furies were introduced in the chorus. 

872 Darkness visible. Paradise Lost, I, 63. 

880 Scots wha hae wi* Wallace bled. For Burns's Bannockhurn, 
see Appendix, p. 94. 



EXPLANATORY NOTES 75 

882 This dithyrambic was composed on horseback, etc. Burns, 
writing to George Thomson, a publisher, September, 1793, 
says concerning the writing of the poem, " This thought 
[i.e. of Bruce's march at the battle of Bannockburn], in 
my yesternight's evening-walk, warmed me to a pitch of 
enthusiasm on the theme of liberty and independence, 
which I threw into a kind of Scots Ode, fitted to the air 
[i.e. of "Hey, tutti, taitie "], that one might suppose to be 
the gallant royal Scot's address to his heroic followers on 
that eventful morning." This is at variance with Syme's 
account, which Dr. Currie gave credence to in his life of 
Burns. 

895 Macpherson^s Farewell. See Appendix, p. 95. 

898 Caxms, the half -man whom Hercules slew for stealing the 

cattle under his charge. Segjiri iigiif frfflWiif; YHI, 185-279. 

899 Nimrod, the prototype of hunters. See Genesis x. 

908 At Thebes, and in Pelops' line. The reference is to Milton's 
II Penseroso, line 99. What Carlyle means by " material 
Fate matched against man's Free-will," etc., is best repre- 
sented, among these allusions, by the tale of Laius and 
Jocasta, and their vain attempt to avert the oracle which 
said that their son, (Edipus, should slay his father and 
marry his mother. The story of (Edipus and Jocasta is 
the subject of the (Edipus Tyrannus of Sophocles. 

929 For these poems, already mentioned, see Appendix. 

930 Elegy on poor Mailie. See Appendix, p. 96. 
933 Sterne. See note to 842. 

944 Tarn o' Shanter. See Appendix, p. 89. 

957 Tieck . . . Musaus. Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) and Johann 
Karl August Musaus (1735-1787) worked with the material 
of popular legends, but the latter treated his material in a 
satirical vein rather than in the spirit of the original. 

962 Tophet. Compare Milton, Paradise Lost, I, 404-405 : — 

*' The pleasant valley of Hinnom, Tophet thence ' 
And black Gehenna called, the type of Hell." 

980 The Jolly Beggars. See Appendix, p. 8"9. 
987 Raucle carlin, stout old woman. This and the following ref- 
erences are to people in the poem. 




76 NOTES 

1005 Teniers. David Teniers (1610-1694), a celebrated Flemish 
painter of the scenes of low life. 

1010 Beggars' Opera. By John Gay (1685-1732). Beggars' Bush. 
By John Fletcher (1579-1625). Says Lockhart, Zi/e of 
Burns, Ch. IX, " Beggars' Bush and Beggars' Opera sink 
into tameness in the comparison." 

1017 Songs. Compare note to 679. 

1030 Persons of quality. Persons of rank or birth. 

1032 Ossorius the Portugal Bishop. The quotation is from Bacon 
Of the Advancement of Learning, Book I. Jeronymo Osorio 
(1506-1580) was called "the Cicero of Portugal," because 
of his Latin style. 

1038 Limbo. Borderland. For a more sjiecific meaning see Mil- 
ton, Paradise Lost, III, 495. 

1070 Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut. See Appendix, p. 97. 

1071 Mary in Heaven. See Appendix, p. 98. 

1072 Auld Langsyne. See Appendix, p. 99. 

1073 Duncan Gray. See Appendix, p. 100. 

1080 Fletcher. Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1655-1710), a Scotch 
political writer. 

1107 Our Grays and Glovers. Thomas Gray (1716-1771), the 
author of the Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, one 
of the best-known English poets. Richard Glover (1712- 
1785), a now little read writer of epics and verses of a semi- 
political character. 
Goldsmith. Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) gives, in his 
Deserted Village, as well as in The Vicar of Wakefield and 
She Stoops to Conquer, purer sketches of English life than 
his contemporaries here mentioned. Johnson. See note 
to 856. The Rambler was a periodical after the manner 
of Addison's Spectator. The scene of Rasselas, Prince of 
Abyssinia, is a wholly imaginary one, but the characters are 
as much English as anything else. 

1119 Geneva. Geneva, the capital of Switzerland, has, from its 
situation, been a meeting place of the nations adjoining it. 
Calvin lived there, and Yoltaire found it a city of refuge 
from persecution. 

1121 Addison and Steele . . . Spectators. Joseph Addison 
(1672-1719) and Richard Steele (1672-1729) introduced 



EXPLANATORY NOTES 77 

into the Spectator (1711-1714) many scenes and characters 
of English life, as in the Sir Roger de Coverley papers. 
John Boston. The work referred to is Human Nature in 
its Fourfold State, by Thomas Boston (1677-1732). 

1125 Schisms in our National Church. Such struggles as those of 

the Covenanters (see Scott's Old Mortality) and that of 
the Old Lights and the Xew Lights are referred to. 

1126 The fiercer schisms in our Body Politic. Refers to the long 

struggle between the adherents of the Stuarts, the Jaco- 
bites, and the government of William III, Anne, and the 
Georges (see Scott's Waverley, A Legend of Montrose, etc.). 

1129 Lord Kames. Henry Home Karnes (1696-1782), author of 
the Elements of Criticism. 

1131 Hume. David Hume (1711-1776), a philosopher and author 
of a well-known history of England. Robertson. William 
Robertson (1721-1793), the historian. Smith. Adam 
Smith (1723-1790), author of The Wealth of Nations, the 
first celebrated English work on modern economic science. 

1140 Racine. Jean Racine (1639-1699), a famous French classic 

dramatist. Voltaire. Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire 
(1694-1778), one of the most renowned of French writers, 
'■} a poet, dramatist, historian, and controversial writer. Bat- 
teux. Charles Batteux (1713-1780), a French critic of the 
school of Boileau. 

1141 Boileau. Nicholas Boileau-Despreaux (1636-1711), the most 

famous of French critics of the classi<3al period. 

1142 Montesquieu. Charles de Secondat, Baron de M. (1689-1755), 

a French jurist and political philosopher, author of the 
celebrated U Esprit des Lois, 

1143 Mably. Gabriel Bonnot, Abbe de Mably (1709-1785), a 

French publicist; 

1144 Quesnay. Francois Quesnay (1694-1774), a French econo- 

mist. 

1148 La Fldche. A town on the Loire River in France ; here Hume 
spent some years. 

1171 Doctrine of Rent, Adam Smith's. Natural History of Religion, 
Hume's. 

1177 Propaganda Missionaries. A body of Roman Catholic mis- 
sionaries organized to promote the faith in heretic countries. 



78 NOTES 

1188 A tide of Scottish prejudice, etc. The quotation is somewhat 
altered from Burns's autobiographical letter to Dr. Moore, 
of August 2, 1787. 

1202-11 From the poem, To the Guidvnfe of Wauchope House, 
See Appendix, p. 89. Bear, barley. 

1253 Rock of Independence. Compare 1695 and 2079. 

1331 Let us worship God. This and the following phrase, " priest- 
like father," are from The Cotter's Saturday Night. See 
Appendix, p. 101. 

1351 The verses are from Wordsworth's The Leech Gatherer ; or 
Resolution and Independence^ and refer directly to Burns. 
Carlyle has, however, as often, been inexact. Wordsworth 

says: — 

** Of Him who walked in glory and in joy, 
Following his plough, along the mountain-side." 

1353 From the best evidence, etc. Professor Noyes's note on this 
passage is interesting; it hints at the nature of some of 
Carlyle's generalizations (compare note to 882) : — 

" Apparently the best ^ evidence' is conflicting. Burns, in 
his autobiographical letter to Dr. Mo6re, says of himself as 
a boy : ' I was, perhaps, the most ungainly, awkward being 
in the parish.' And Murdoch, Burns's schoolmaster, in a 
letter printed in Currie's Life and reproduced in Lockhart's, 
says : ' Robert's ear was remarkably dull, and his voice 
untunable. . . . Robert's countenance w^as generally grave 
and expressive of a serious, contemplative, and thoughtful 
mind.' " 

1391 Adamant. An alleged stone of surpassing hardness ; here the 
magnetic force of the adamant, or loadstone, is alluded to. 

1414 Passions raging like demons. Misquoted by Carlyle from the 
Letter to Dr. Moore. 

1430 Hungry Ruin has him in the wind. Ruin, like a wolf, has 
the scent of him. The phrase is a quotation from Burns's 
Letter to Dr. Moore. 

1433 Gloomy night is gathering fast. Quoted by Burns in his Let- 
ter to Dr. Moore, from the last poem w^hich Burns supposed 
he should w^rite in Scotland, The Bonie Banks of Ayr. 
See Appendix, p. 107. 

1451 A mockery king. Shakspere, Richard II, iv, 1, line 260. 



EXPLANATORY NOTES 79 

1453 Rieiizi. Niccolo Gabrini Rienzi (1313-1354), the so-called 
^' last of the tribunes " of Rome, a Roman popular leader 
who obtained privileges and liberty from the nobles for the 
people, but later became so arrogant as to lose his power 
and his life at the hands of the populace. 

1458 Mr. Lockhart . . . forcible observations. Life of Burns, Ch,Y, 

1470 Bon-mots. Witty sayings. 
^1'1489 Mr. Walker. Josiah Walker, author of a life of Burns. 

1493 The quotation from Scott occurs in Lockhart, Ch. V. 

1494 Virgilium vidi tantum. I have at least seen Virgil. Ovid, 

Tristia, IV, x. 51. 

1503 Professor Ferguson. Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), the prede- 
cessor of Dugald Stewart as professor of philosophy at 
Edinburgh. 

1505 Dugald Stewart. See note to 715. 

1508 Bunbury. Henry William Bunbury (1750-1811), an amateur 
artist and caricaturist. 

1520 Langhorne. John Langhorne (1735-1779), a poet and trans- 
lator of Plutarch's Lives. 

1528 Mr. Nasmyth. Alexander Nasmyth (1758-1840) painted the 
best known portrait of Burns in 1787. It is reproduced in 
this volume. 

1534 Douce gudeman. Sedate goodman. 

1553 Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson. See note to 184. 

1558 In malam partem. In ill part, with malice. 

1604 Blacklock. Thomas Blacklock (1721-1791), a blind poet, one 
of Burns's most generous sympathizers. 

1630 Excise and Farm scheme. See Introduction, Note on the 
Life of Burns. 

1649 Did not intend to borrow honour from any profession. Quoted 
from Burns in Lockhart, Ch. VIT. 

1680 Maecenases. Maecenas, a friend of Augustus Caesar, was the 
patron of Virgil and Horace. 

1695 The Rock of Independence. Compare 1253 and 2079. 

1708 Meteors of French Politics. The time was that of the Revolu- 
tion in France, and the struggle for human rights appealed 
to Burns. See Introduction, Note on the Life of Burns. 

1727 Jacobin. A member of one of the turbulent political clubs 
of Paris during the Revolution, so-called because its secret 



80 NOTES 

meetings were held in the Jacobin convent in the Rue St. 
Jacques. See Introduction, Note on Life of Burns. 

1737 Grocerdom and Grazierdom. Tradespeople and farmers. 

1742 Life of Burns, Ch. VIII. 

1752 Lady Grizzel Baillie (1665-1746), a Loyalist lady, one of the 
heroic figures in Scotch history. 

1753-60 Ance, once. Fu\ full. Ane, one. Hing, hang. Boivie, 
sad. Corn-biyig, corn-heap. Sud, should. Linking, trip- 
ping along. Werena, were not. 

1773 Now. About 1790. See Introduction, Note on the Life of 
Burns. 

1794 Thoughtless follies . . . laid him low. From A Bard's Epi- 
taph. See Appendix, p. 108. 

1858 Twice cursed. Compare Merchant of Venice^ IV, i, 185-186 : — 

'* It is twice blest: 
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes." 

1900 Butler. See note to 2. 

1901 Cervantes. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616), 

author of 1')on Quixote, was for a time enslaved in Algiers, 
and was imprisoned in Madrid for debt. 

1903 Haws. Hedges. 

1904 Nobility and gentry of his native land . . . Scottish Bard, 

proud of his name and country. A phrase bearing some 
resemblance to Burns's dedication to the second, or Edin- 
burgh, edition of his poems. 
1908 Borough. '' In Scotland, a body corporate, consisting of the 
inhabitants of a certain district, elected by the sovereign, 
with a certain jurisdiction." — Webster. 

1947 Roger Bacon (1214?-1294), an English monk and philoso- 

pher, a student of natural science, possibly the discoverer 
of the secret of making gunpowder. He was imprisoned 
for his writings, which were thought to be heretical. Gali- 
leo. An Italian astronomer (1564-1642), to whom we owe 
the telescope ; he was imprisoned for his advocacy of the 
now accepted Copernican theory of the movement of the 
solar system. 

1948 Tasso. Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), author of the famous 

Italian epic poem, Jerusalem Delivered, was confined in a 
mad-house for seven years, possibly for political reasons. 



EXPLANATORY NOTES 81 

Camoens. Luis de Camoens (15247-L580), the most cele- 
brated poet of Portugal, author of the epic poem, The 
LusiadSy spent sixteen years of his life as a soldier in Africa 
and India, losing an eye in the service and undergoing at 
least one shipwreck, and died in poverty in Lisbon. 

1991 Restaurateur. The keeper of an eating-house or restaurant. 
The reference is possibly to the phenomenon, not unknown 
in France, of the keeper of the cabaret who is at the same 
time a ballad-maker and uses his talent to amuse his 
guests. There may be here, as Professor Noyes suggests, 
a veiled sneer at Scott and Byron, — not that they kept 
inns ! 

2019 Locke. John Locke (1632-1704), an English philosopher, 
author of the famous book referred to. 

2027 Araucana. By Alonzo de Ercilla y Zuiiiga (1533-1595) ; it 
deals with the expedition against Arauco in Chili, in which 
the poet took part. 

2069 Rabelais. Francois Rabelais (1495-1553), a great French 
satirist, whose Gargantua and Pantagruel are the proto- 
types of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, 

2097 Jean Paul. Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1563-1625), a Ger- 
man moralist who had great influence on Carlyle. Carlyle 
WTote two essays on Jean Paul {Edinburgh Review, 1827, 
and Foreign Review, 1830). 

2118 Run amuck. To assail indiscriminately, in the manner of 
Malays, who sometimes when intoxicated run about slash- 
ing people. 

2141 Purchased a pocket-copy of Milton to study the character of 
Satan. Letter of Burns, quoted by Lockhart, Ch. YI. 

2177 He who would write, etc. The familiar quotation from 
Milton is (Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, ninth edition, p. 
253), "He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write 
well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a 
true poem." Apology for Smectymnuus. 
— ^182 Besing. Apparently a coinage of Carlyle's on the analogy 

of such words as bedaub, 
^ 2211 Plebiscita. In Ya\^\^, plebiscite, a general popular vote. 

2223 Ginhorse. A horse which turns a mill, going continually in 
a circle. 



82 NOTES 

2228 Swifts. Jonathan Swift (1667-1744), author of Gulliver's 
Travels, and many other satirical works. Rousseaus. 
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), a notable French 
philosopher and reformer. 

2233 Ramsgate. A port on the coast of Kent, England. Isle of 
Dogs. A small peninsula in the river Thames. 

2243 Valclusa Fountain. At Vaucluse in southern France. Here 
Petrarch (1304-1374), the great Italian lyric poet, passed 
some time, and wrote poems celebrating the fountain. 



III. QUESTIONS ON THE ESSAY 

I. With regard to the substance : — 

1. What are the principal events in the life of Burns ? Does it 
seem to you to have been lived under a great variety of conditions 
and in a vast number of places, as was, for example, that of his 
countryman, Robert Louis Stevenson, a typical modern writer? 

2. What does the essay say with regard to Burns's personal ap- 
pearance ? 

3. What does Carlyle say about Burns's pride and independ- 
ence ? 

4. What about the poet's politics ? What does Carlyle intend 
the discussion of this point to illustrate ? 

5. Describe the Edinburgh people of Burns's time. How far 
do you judge Carlyle's picture to be just? 

6. Wherein does Carlyle regard Burns as ft great poet? 

7. What, according to Carlyle, is the nature, as regards matter 
and quality, of Burns's poetry ? 

8. What poems of Burns are apparently favorites of Carlyle, 
and why? 

9. Why is Burns's life " far more interesting than any of his 
written works " (1214) ? What are the main features of Burns's 
life as a man? How, in Carlyle's judgment, is he wanting? 

10. What has Carlyle to say of Burns's letters ? 

II. How is what Carlyle says of Homer (496), and of Shaks- 
pere and Burns (569) characteristic of him ? 

12. What do you gather from paragraph 2 with regard to the 



QUESTIONS ON THE ESSAY 83 

character and point of view of Carlyle ? What from paragraphs 
15, 16, 40, 61, and others? 

13. "Burns was no vulgar wonder" (150). Does this seem to 
you to express Carlyle? Compare On Heroes and Hero -Worship, 

14. " To measure him [Burns] by any true standard " (53). 
What is Carlyle's standard as it appears in the essay ? 

15. What do Carlyle's remarks on the biographies by Currie 
and Walker (paragraph 3) tell you about him ? What is Carlyle's 
notion of biography (paragraph 5) ? Wherein do you infer that 
the lives of Burns mentioned by Carlyle fall short of this ? 

16. What from Carlyle's discussion of the songs of Burns 
should you gather to be Carlyle's conception of true lyric poetry? 

17. What, in the opinion of Carlyle, are bad qualities in litera- 
ture ? See paragraphs 12, 32, 36, 68, and others. Can you give any 
illustrative examples from your own reading ? 

18. What of Carlyle's view of criticism ? See paragraph 8. 

19. What do you infer with regard to Carlyle's conception of 
the qualities which go to make up what he regards as the best 
qualities of manhood ? See paragraphs 2, 8, 9, 42, 65, 68, and 70. 

20. Can you make any general classification of the uses to 
which Carlyle puts his many quotations from Burns ? 

21. Whence, exactly, does Carlyle draw the following phrases: 
"Ask for bread and receive a stone" (3); "do men gather 
grapes of thorns?" (1901); "so persecuted they the prophets" 
(1950) ; " triumphed over Death, and led it captive " (1972) ; 
" cannot serve God and Mammon " (2147) ? Do you note other 
phrases from the same source ? 

22. How far does Carlyle, in general, make use of quotation? 
What does the quotation, taken as a whole, indicate with regard 
to Carlyle ? 

23. How far does Lockhart serve Carlyle as a mere means of 
introducing the essay? How" far does Carlyle gather his facts 
from Lockhart ? See Life of Burns, by Lockhart. 

24. Does Carlyle seem to you to treat one man, or one class of 
men, with undue disfavor for the sake of raising up others? 
Compare what Carlyle says with regard to Ferguson and Ramsay 
(page 6), certain poets (p. 10), of the prosaic age in which Burns 
was born (p. 6), of Byron (p. 12), of the Edinburgh people, and 
even of Burns himself as compared with Camoens, Cervantes, and 



84 NOTES 

others. Do you note any other instances of comparison? In each 
case explain Carlyle's reasons for the comparison. 

25. With regard to what Garlyle says in line 1322, can you give 
any instances of men who have changed the course of a literature ? 
Do you deem such a thing possible ? The question is a good one 
to think hard about. Compare what Carlyle says of Burns and 
Shakspere on p. 17. 

26. Do you fancy it strictly true that Burns, while at Mt. Oli- 
phant, Ix)chlea, and Mossgiel, before the visit to Irvine, '' was the 
gayest, brightest, most fantastic, fascinating being to be found in the 
world " (1354) V Compare Burns's own words and those of his tutor, 
Murdoch. See note to 1353. How do you account for Carlyle's opin- 
ion ? In general, do you note any inconsistency in Carlyle's position ? 

27. Can you cite any instances in literary history of the effects 
of such "lionizing" as Burns underwent? 

28. Why should red-wat-shod be "perhaps too frightfully accu- 
rate for art " (710) ? 

29. Do you see any good reason for calling the state of letters 
in Scotland at the time of Burns an evil (1174) ? 

30. " But the writer of a true poem, like the apostle of a true 
religion, is really sure of the contrary" (7). What examples 
can you cite to prove the soundness of this generalization? 

II. With regard to the arrangement : — 

1. Can you make any general division of the Essay on Burns 
into Introduction, Essay Proper, and Conclusion? If so, indicate 
these divisions. 

2. To what end does the Life of Burns by Lockhart serve Car- 
lyle? See 20. 

3. What value in the structure of the essay has the mention 
(paragraph 3) of the biographies by Currie and Walker? 

4. Where does Carlyle state the purpose or imply the purpose 
of his essay? (As for instance in 55-57.) 

5. Where may Carlyle's Introduction be said to end? Just 
what, if any, questions has he brought up for discussion ? What 
do you know from the Introduction with regard to Carlyle's pur- 
pose and his point of view ? 

6. If there is a division of the essay which, for convenience, 
might be called the Essay Proper, can you subdivide this into 



QUESTIONS ON THE ESSAY 85 

smaller parts? If so, with what does each of these parts deal? 
What is the relation of each of these parts to the other parts ? Do 
you see any special reason why Carlyle has arranged these subdivi- 
sions in their present order? Would another arrangement have 
materially weakened the essay ? 

7. What is the function of paragraph 13 ? Does it seem to you 
to bring the discussion of the qualities of Burns into sharper out- 
line, or to serve merely as a digression ? In general, what digres- 
sions do you note in the essay? What is the purpose of each of 
these ? See, for example, paragraphs 25 and 26. 

8. Can you poiat out a definite conclusion to the essay? If so, 
where does it begin ? Does this conclusion make an exact summary 
of the points Carlyle has made in the essay? If not, what does it 
do? 

III. With regard to the style of the essay : — 

1. What, in general, are some of the principal features that you 
notice with regard to the style of the essay, particularly of its words 
and sentences ? 

2. What should you say with regard to Carlyle's diction in para- 
graphs 7 and 12, for instance ? What are some of the noteworthy 
features ? Analyze some of the figures of speech. 

3. How does Carlyle's use of sjDecific names, as at the end of 
paragraph 16, lend force to his style? Does this sort of word seem 
frequent in the essay ? 

4. Do you understand just what is meant by such terms, among 
very many others, as *' strictly intellectual perception" (713), 
"weak-eyed, maudlin sensibility" (726), "light" (791), and 
" warmth " (795), " casual radiance " (154), "sulphurous humour " 
(409), "natural truth of style" (439), "cobweb speculations" 
(567), "frightfully accurate" (711), "fervid affection" (804), 
"different, original, peculiar" (933), "that dark, earnest, 
wondering age" (949), "strictly poetical purposes" (968), 
" tawdry, hollow, wine-bred madrigals" (1031), "grace and truth 
of external movement" (1058), "mould" (1180), etc.? How 
many of these words and phrases are to be taken literally and as 
standing for exactly the defined ideas, and how many are more or 
less figurative ? What in general, should you say of Carlyle's 
accuracy of language, of the size of his vocabulary, of the wealth 



86 . NOTES 

of his imagery, etc. ? What of the connotation and suggestion of 
the words ? Note other examples. In general, do you note many 
words and phrases which seem to you unusual or used with an 
uncommon meaning ? 

5. What effect on the style of the essay have such phrases as 
" Ask for bread and receive a stone " V (For others, see Questions 
with regard to the substance, 21.) In general what is the effect of 
the large number of phrases quoted by Carlyle ? What, if any- 
thing, do they tell you about the author ? 

6. Does Carlyle seem to use much interrogation ? What is the 
effect of it taken as a whole ? 

7. Explain, as on page 2 for example, the large number of capital 
letters used by Carlyle. 

8. Do you understand the close of paragraph 1 to be somewhat 
ironical ? Can you point to other instances of this manner in the 
essay ? 

9. What are the most noticeable qualities of Carlyle's manner 
which you observe in the essay, as for instance, warmth and ear- 
nestness ? Can you, in general, say how these effects are obtained ? 
Wherein do you deem these qualities to be characteristic of the 
author? Is it possible to imagine that another man might have 
said the same things about Burns, but have expressed his thought 
in a very precise and literal way ? 

10. Do you remark any striking differences in style between the 
present essay and other writings of Carlyle, as Sartor Resartus, On 
Heroes and Hero-Worship'? Do you note more mannerism in the 
latter work than in the earlier? If so, explain. 

Note : — Further questions of the same general sort, if the 
teacher so desires it, might be asked about the facts of Carlyle's 
life. There remain many questions of syntax and arrangement of 
sentences, as in paragraph 59, the parsing of which would tax the 
grammatical knowledge of the student. Such questions, however, 
may be left to the discretion of the teacher ; in general, much 
insistence on them, though doubtless an aid to training for a par- 
ticular examination, tends to blind the student to the main issues, 
competent and sympathetic knowledge of the essay. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 87 



IV. BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Editions of Carlyle and of Burns, complete or of single books, are 
numerous, and the amount of comment is also vast. As an aid to 
the student some of the more important may be specified : — 

Carlyle. — Of his works, the best complete edition, aside from 
his correspondence, is probably the Ashburton Edition, in 17 vols. 
(London, 1885-1888). The Early Letters of Thomas Carlyle, the 
Correspondence between Goethe and Thomas Carlyle, and the Corre- 
spondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph TValdo Emerson, edited 
by Professor Charles Eliot Norton, are the best editions of his 
correspondence. Of works about Carlyle, Fronde's Thomas Carlyle, 
in 4 vols. (1882-1884), is the great biography. Shorter lives are 
those of John Nichol, in the English Men of^Letters Series, Richard 
Garnett, in the Great Writers Series (to which there is added a 
very full bibliography), and Leslie Stephen, in the Dictionary of 
National Biography. Of critical essays, one should refer to those 
of Matthew Arnold (Emerson in Discourses in America), Augustine 
Birrell (Obiter Dicta), James Russell Lowell (Prose Works, vol. ii), 
John Morley (Miscellanies, vol. i), J. M. Robertson (Modern 
Humanists), and Leslie Stephen (Hours in a Library, vol. iii). 
Froude's edition of the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle 
should also be spoken of. 

Burns. — Of his works, the best edition is that of Dr. Robert 
Chambers, revised by William Wallace, in 4 vols. (The Life and 
Works of Robert Burns, New York, 1896). This contains, as far 
as such a thing is possible, about all the necessary material. 
The Centenary Edition of The Poetry of Burns, edited by W. E. 
Henley and T. F. Henderson, in 4 vols. (1896-1898), is also ex- 
cellent, but includes nothing but the verse. Cheaper editions are 
everywhere to be found ; that of the letters in the Camelot Series 
is satisfactory. Of works about Burns, Lockhart's Life of Burns, 
and the biographies by Principal Shairp, in the English Men of 
Letters Series, by J. Stuart Blackie in the Great Writers Series (a 
full bibliography is added), and by Leslie Stephen in the Dictionary 
of National Biography should be referred to. Commentary of a 
critical sort may also be found in literary histories, as Taine's 
English Literature, Mr. Oliphant's Literary History of England in 



88 NOTES 

the End of the Eighteenth and the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century, 
and Ward's English Poets. Of critical essays, the chief is that 
printed in this volume. Those of Principal J. C. Shairp (^Aspects 
of Poetry), J. M. Robertson {New Essays toward a Critical Method), 
and Robert Louis Stevenson {Familiar Studies of Men and Books) 
should also be mentioned. Mr. Robertson's opinions may be set 
against the glowing panegyric of Lord Rosebery (Lectures and 
Addresses). . 



APPENDIX 

This appendix contains a few of the shorter poems and songs 
of Burns, to which Carlyle refers in his essay. It is to be regretted 
that there is not sufficient space to print all the poems mentioned 
by Carlyle, but as characteristic a selection as possible has been 
made, and one long poem, The Cotter's Saturday Nighty has for 
obvious reasons been included. It is hoped that this selection 
will serve the student as an introduction to the poetry of Burns, 
if he has not already made the acquaintance of it, and the selec- 
tion will at least enable him to compare his own impressions with 
those of jCarlyle. The student is strongly recommended to read, 
in any of the scores of good editions of Burns, the other poems 
cited by Carlyle, — Halloween, The Holy Fair, A Winter Night, The 
Brigs of Ayr, The Auld Farmer's New Year Morning Salutation to 
His Auld Mare Maggie, To William Simson, An Address to the 
De'il, Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Oswald, Tarn o' Shanter, The Jolly 
Beggars, To the Guidwife of Wauchope House, and Scotch Drink, — 
to gain a glimpse of other aspects of the poet's genius. 

TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY 

ON TURNING ONE DOWN, WITH THE PLOUGH, 
IN APRIL, 1T86 

Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r, ^ 

Thou's met me in an evil hour ; 

For I maun crush amang the stoure dust 

Thy slender stem ; 
To spare thee now is past my pow'r, 

Thou bonie gem. 

Alas ! it's no thv neebor sweet, 
The bonie lark, companion meet ! 
Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet ! 

Wi' spreckl'd breast. 
When upward-springing, blythe, to greet 

The purpling east. 
89 



90 ,, APPENDIX 

Cauld blew the bitter-biting North 

Upon thy early, humble birth, 

Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth peeped 

Amid the storm, 
Scarce rear'd above the parent earth 

Thy tender form. 

The flaunting flow'rs our gardens yield. 

High shelt'ring woods and wa's maun shield, walls 

But thou beneath the random bield shelter 

O' clod or stane, 
Adorns the histie stibble-field, barren 

Unseen, alane. 

There, in thy scanty mantle clad. 
Thy snawy bosom sunward spread, 
Thou lifts thy unassuming head 

In humble guise ; 
But now the share uptears thy bed, 

An' low thou lies ! 

Such is the fate of artless maid, , 

Sweet flow'ret of the rural shade ! 
By love's simplicity betray'd, 

And guileless trust. 
Till she, like thee, all soil'd, is laid 

Low i' the dust. 

Such is the fate of simple bard 

On life's rough ocean luckless starr'd ! 

Unskilful he to note the card chart 

Of prudent lore, 
Till billows rage, and gales blow hard. 

And whelm him o'er ! 

Such fate to suffering worth is giv'n, 
Who long with wants and woes has striv'n. 
By human pride or cunning driv'n 

To mis'ry's brink, 
Till wrench'd of ev'ry stay but Heav'n, 

He, ruin'd, sink ! 



TO A MOUSE 



91 



Ev^'n thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate, 
That fate is thine — no distant date ; 
Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives, elate, 

Full on thy bloom. 
Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight, 

Shall be thy doom ! 



TO A MOUSE, 



ON TURNING HER UP IN HER NEST, WITH THE 



Wee, sleekit, cowrin', tim'rous beastie. 
Oh, what a panic's in thy breastie ! 
Thou needna start awa' sae hasty, 

Wi' bick'ring brattle ! 
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee, 

Wi' murd'ring pattle ! 

I'm trulj^ sorry man's dominion 
Has broken nature's social union, 
An' justifies that ill opinion 

Which makes thee startle 
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion. 

An' fellow-mortal ! 



sleek 
little breast 

hasty scam- 
per 

the stick 
used to 
scrape clay 
from the 
ploughshare 



I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve ; 
What then ? poor beastie, thou maun live ! 
A daimen icker in a thrave 

'S a sma' request: 
I'll get a blessin' wi' the lave, 

And never miss't ! 



sometimes 

an occa- 
sional ear 
of corn in 
twenty-four 
sheaves 
remainder 



Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin ! 
Its silly wa's the win's are strewin' ! 
An' naething now to big a new ane 

O' foggage green ! 
An' bleak December's winds ensuin', 

Baith snell and keen ! 



walls 
build 
moss 

biting 



92 



APPENDIX 



Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste, 
An' weary winter comin' fast, . 
An' cozie here, beneath the blast, 

Thou thought to dwell, 
Till, crash ! the cruel coulter past 

Out through thy cell. 

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble 
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble ! 
Now thou's turn'd out for a' thy trouble. 

But house or hald. 
To thole the winter's sleety dribble, 

An' cranreuch cauld! 

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane 
In proving foresight may be vain ! 
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men 

Gang aft a-gley, 
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain 

For promised joy. 

Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me ! 
The present only toucheth thee : 
But, och ! I backward cast my e'e 

On prospects drear ! 
An' forward, though I canna see, 

I guess an' fear ! 



without 
house 
endure — 
drizzle 
hoar-frost 

not alone 



often go 
wrong 



ON SEEING A FELLOW WOUND A HARE 

WITH A SHOT, APRIL, 1789 

Inhuman man ! curse on thy barb'rous art. 
And blasted be thy nmrder-aiming eye : 
May never pity soothe thee with a sigh. 
Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart ! 



Go live, poor wand'rer of the wood and field, 
The bitter little that of life remains ! 
No more the thick'ning brakes and verdant plains 
To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield. 



OPEN THE DOOR TO ME 93 

Seek, mangled innocent, some wonted form ; 
That wonted form, alas ! thy dying bed ! 
The shelt'ring rushes whistling o'er thy head, 
The cold earth with thy blood-stained bosom warm. 

Perhaps a mother's anguish adds its woe ; 
The playful pair crowd fondly by thy side : 
Ah, helpless nurslings, who will now provide 
That life a mother only can bestow ? 

Oft as by winding Nith I, musing, wait 

The sober eve, or hail the cheerful dawn, 

I'll miss thee sporting o'er the dewy lawn, 

And curse the ruthless wretch and mourn thy hapless fate. 



OPEN THE DOOR TO ME^ 

Oh, open the door, some pity to shew, 

Oh, open the door to me, oh ! 
Though thou hast been false, I'll ever prove true. 

Oh, open the door to me, oh ! 

Caidd is the blast upon my pale cheek. 

But caulder thy love for me, oh ! 
The frost that freezes the life at my heart 

Is nought to my pains frae thee, oh ! 

The wan moon is setting behind the white wave. 

And time is setting with me, oh ! 
False friends, false love, farewell ! for mair 

I'll ne'er trouble them nor thee, oh ! 

She has open'd the door, she has open'd it wide ; 

She sees his pale corse on the plain, oh ! 
My true love ! she cried, and sank down by his side^ 

Never to rise again, oh ! 

1 This song belongs to 1793. 



94 . APPENDIX 

BANNOCKBURNi 

[ROBERT BRUCE*S ADDRESS TO HIS ARMY] 

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled ! 
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led ! 
Welcome to your gory bed. 
Or to glorious victorie ! 

Now's the day, and now's the hour; 
See the front o* battle lower ! 
See approach proud Edward's power — 
Edward ! chains and slaverie ! 

Wha will be a traitor knave? 
Wha can fill a coward's grave ? 
Wha sae base as be a slave ? 

Traitor ! coward ! turn and flee ! 

Wha for Scotland's king and law 
Freedom's sword will strongly draw. 
Free-man stand, or free-man fa', 
Sodger ! hero ! on wi' me ! 

By oppression's woes and pains! 
By your sons in servile chains ! 
We will drain our dearest veins. 

But they shall be — shall be free ! 

Lay the proud usurpers low ! 
Tyrants fall in every foe ! 
Liberty's in every blow ! 

Forward ! let us do or die ! 



1 This stirring poem was composed in September, 1793. There are two 
or three versions of it ; this is the final one. 



MACPHERSON'S FAREWELL 95 



MACPHERSON'S FAREWELL i 

Farewell, ye dungeons dark and strong, 

The wretch's destinie ! 
Macpherson's time will not be long 

On yonder gallows-tree. 

Chorus — Sae rantingiy, sae wantonly, 

Sae dauntingiy gaed he ; defiantly 

He play'd a spring, and danc'd it round. 



went 
tune 



Below the gallows-tree. 

Oh what is death but parting breath ? 

On many a bloody plain 
I've dar'd his face, and in this place 

I scorn him yet again ! 

Untie these bands from off my hands, 

And bring to me my sword ; 
And there's no a man in all Scotland 

But I'll brave him at a word. 

I've liv'd a life of sturt and strife ; violence 

I die by treacherie : 
It burns my heart I must depart, 

And not avenged be. 

Now farewell light, thou sunshine bright, 

And all beneath the sky ! 
May coward shame distain his name, 

The wretch that dares not die ! 

1 "Macpherson's Lament," says Sir Walter Scott, ''was a well-known 
song many years before the Ayrshire Bard wrote these additional verses, 
which constitute its principal merit. This noted freebooter was executed 
at Inverness about the beginning of the last century. When he came to 
the fatal tree, he played the tune to which he has bequeathed his name 
upon a favourite violin ; and, holding up the instrument, he offered it to 
any one of his clan who would undertake to play the tune over his body 
at the lyke-wake. As none answered he dashed it to pieces on the execu- 
tioner's head, and flung himself from the ladder." 

The poem belongs to Burns's Edinburgh period, 1788. 



96 



APPENDIX 



POOR MAILIE'S ELEGY 1 



Lament in rhyme, lament in prose, 
Wi' saut tears tricklin' down your nose ; 
Our bardie's fate is at a close. 

Past a' remead ; 
The last sad cape-stane o' his woe's 

Poor Mailie's dead ! 



bard's 
remedy 



It's no the loss o' warl's gear, 
That could sae bitter draw the tear, 
Or mak' our bardie, dowie, wear 

The mournin' weed : 
He's lost a friend an' neebor dear 

In Mailie dead. 



worn with 
grief 



Through a' the town she trotted by him; 
A lang half-mile she could descry him ; 
Wi' kindly bleat, when she did spy him. 

She ran wi' speed ; 
A friend mair faithfu' ne'er came nigh him 

Than Mailie dead. 



I wat she was a sheep o' sense. 
An' could behave hersel' wi' mense ; 
I'll say't, she never brak a fence 

Through thievish greed. 
Our bardie, lanely, keeps the spence 

Sin' Mailie's dead. 



good man- 
ners 



inner room 



Or, if he wanders up the howe. 

Her living image in her yowe 

Comes bleating to him, owre the knowe, 

For bits o' bread; 
An' down the briny pearls rowe 

For Mailie dead. 



dell 
ewe 
knoll 

roll 



1 This poem belongs to the Lochlea period. Mailie wasn't really stran- 
gled, and in this fact the humor lies. 



WILLIE BREW'D A PECK O' MAUT 



97 



She was nae get o' moorland tips, 

Wi' tauted ket, an' hahy hips ; 

For her forbears were brought in ships 

Frae yont the Tweed : 
A bonier fleesh ne'er crossed the clips 

Than Mailie's — dead. 

Wae worth the man wha first did shape 
That vile, wanchancie thing — a i-aep ! 
It mak's guid fellows girn an' gape, 

Wi' chokin' dread; 
An' Eobin's bonnet wave wi' crape 

For Mailie dead. 

O, a' ye bards on bonie Doon ! 

An' w^ha on Ayr yoar chanters tune ! 

Come, join the melancholious croon 

0' Robin's reed ! • 
His heart will never get aboon — 

His Mailie's dead. 



rams 

matted 

fleece 

ancestors 
fleece 



unlucky 

grin and 
gasp 



dirge 
flageolet 



WILLIE BREW'D A PECK O' MAUTi 

O, Willie brew'd a peck o' maut, 
And Rob and Allan cam' to pree ; 

Three blyther hearts, that lee-Ian g night. 
Ye wad na found in Christendie. 

Chorus — We are na fou, we're nae that fou, 
But just a drappie in our e'e ; 
The cock may craw, the day may daw , 
And ay we'll taste the barley bree. 

Here are we met, three merry boys. 
Three merry boys, I trow, are we ; 

And mony a night we've merry been, 
And mony mae we hope to be ! 



taste 
live-long 



full (drunk 
drop — eye 
dawn 
brew, juice 



Composed at Ellisland in 1789. 



98 



APPENDIX 



It is the moon, I ken her horn, 
That's blmkin' in the lift sae hie; 

She shines sae bright to wyle us hame, 
But, by my sooth, she'll wait a wee ! 

Wha first shall rise to gang awa', 
A cuckold, coward loun is he ! 

Wha first beside his chair shall fa', 
He is the king amang us three ! 



heavens 
high 

lure 

while 



TO MARY IN HEAVEN 1 

Tune — "Death of Captain Cook." 

Thou ling'ring star, with less'ning ray, 

That lov'st to greet the early morn, 
Again thou usher 'st in the day 

My Mary from my soul was torn. 
O Mary ! dear departed shade ! 

Where is thy place of blissful rest ? 
Seest thou thy lover lowly laid ? 

Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast? 

That sacred hour can I forget ? 

Can I forget the hallowed grove 
Where, by the winding Ayr, we* met. 

To live one day of i^arting love ? 
Eternity will not efface 

Those records dear of transports past ; 
Thy image at our last embrace — 

Ah, little thought we 'twas our last ! 

Ayr, gurgling, kiss'd his pebbled shore, 

O'erhung with wild-woods, thickening green ; 
The fragrant birch, and hawthorn hoar 

Twin'd am'rous round the raptur'd scene ; 
The flowers sprang wanton to be prest. 

The birds sang love on every spray. 
Till too, too soon the glowing west, 

Proclaim'd the speed of winged day. 

1 To Mary Campbell. The poem was written at Ellisland some three 
years after her death in 1786. 



AULD LANG SYNE 



99 



Still o'er these scenes my mem'ry wakes, 

And fondly broods with miser-care ! 
Time but th' impression stronger makes, 

As streams their channels deeper wear. 
My Mary, dear departed shade ! 

Where is thy place of blissful rest ? 
Seest thou thy lover lowly laid ? 

Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast? 



AULD LANG SYNEi 

Should auld acquaintance be forgot. 
And never brought to min' ? 

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 
And auld laug syne? 

Chorus — For auld lang syne, my dear, 
For auld lang syne. 
We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet. 
For auld lang syne. 

And surely ye'll be your pint stowp. 

And surely I'll be mine ! 
And we'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet 

For auld lang syne. 

We twa ha'e run about the braes. 
And pou'd the gowans fine ; 

But we've wandered mony a weary fitt 
Sin' auld lang syne. 

We twa ha'e paidl'd in the burn, 

Frae mornin' sun till dine ; 
But seas between us braid ha'e roared 

Sin' auld lang syne. 

And here's a hand, my trustie iiere, 

And gie's a hand o' thine ! 
And we'll tak' a right guid-willie waught. 

For auld lang syne. 

1 This famous song is of about the end of 1788. 



old 



days of long 
ago 



tankard 



pulled 
foot 

waded 

dinner-time 

broad 



friend 



draught 
with good 
will 



LofC. 



100 



APPENDIX 



DUNCAI^ GRAYi 



Duncan Gray cam' here to woo — 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't ! 
On blithe Yule-night, when we were fu' 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't ! 
Maggie coost her head fu' high, 
Looked asklent and unco skeigh, 
Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh ; 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 



Christmas 

tossed [coy 
aslant, very 

made — 
aloof 



Duncan fleech'd, and Duncan pray'd 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig — 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Duncan sigh'd baith out and in, 
Grat his een baith bleer't and blin' , 
Spak' o' lowpin' o'er a linn. 

Ha, ha, &c. 



besought 



wept — 
bleared and 
bUnd 

jumping — 
waterfall 



Time and chance are but a tide — 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Slighted love is sair to bide — 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Shall I, like a fool, quoth he, 
For a haughty hizzie die? 
She may gae to — France for me ! 

Ha, ha, &c. 



hard — 
endure 



hussy 



How it comes let doctors tell — 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Meg grew sick as he grew hale — 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Something in her bosom wrings. 
For relief a sigh she brings ; 
And oh ! her een, they spak' sic things ! 

Ha, ha, &c. 

1 Composed toward the end of 1792. 



eyes — such 



THE COTTER^S SATURDAY NIGHT 101 

Duncan was a lad o' grace — 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Maggie's was a piteous case — 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Duncan could na be her death, 

SvA^elling pity smoor'd his wrath ; smothered 

Now they're crouse and canty baith, cheerful and 

Ha, ha, the wooing o't ! ^^PP^ ^^^^ 



THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT i 

[Inscribed to R. Aiken, Esq.] 

Let not ambition mock their useful toil, 

Their homely joys, and destiny obscure ; 
Nor grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile, 

The short and simple annals of the poor. — Gray. 

My lov'd, my honour'd, much respected friend ! 
No mercenary bard his homage pays ; 
With honest pride I scorn each selfish end. 
My dearest meed, a friend's esteem and praise ; 
To you I sing, in simple Scottish lays. 
The lowly train in life's sequester'd scene ; 
The native feelings strong, the guileless w^ays ; 
What Aiken in a cottage would have been ; 
Ah ! though his worth unknown, far happier there, I 
ween. 

November chill blaws loud wi' angry sugh ; moan 

The short'ning wdnter-day is near a close ; 

The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh ; 

The black'ning trains o' craws to their repose : crows 

The toil-worn Cotter frae his labour goes, — 

This night his weekly moil is at an end, 

Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes, 

Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend. 

And weary, o'er the moor his course does homeward 

bend. 

1 Composed at Mossgiel, 



102 



APPENDIX 



At length his lonely cot appears in view, 
Beneath the shelter of an aged tree ; 
The expectant wee-things, toddlin' stacher through 
To meet their dad, wi' flichterin' noise an* glee. 
His wee bit ingle, blinkin' bonilie. 
His clean hearthstane, his thriftie wifie's smile. 
The lisping infant prattling on his knee. 
Does a' his weary kiaugh and cares beguile. 
An' makes him quite forget his labour an' his toil. 

Belyve, the elderiya±rns come drappin' in. 
At service out, amang the farmers roun' ; 
Some ca' the pie ugh, some herd, some tentie rin 
A cannie errand to a neebor town : 
Their eldest hope, their Jenny, woman grown. 
In youthfu' bloom, love sparkling in her e'e. 
Comes hame ; perhaps, to shew a braw new gown. 
Or deposite her sair-won penny-fee, 
To help her parents dear, if they in hardship be. 

Wi' joy unfeign'd brothers and sisters meet, 
An' each for other's welfare kindly spiers : 
The social hours, swift-wing'd, unnoticed fleet ; 
Each tells the uncos that he sees or hears. 
The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years ; 
Anticipation forward points the ^dew. 
The mother, wi' her needle an' her shears, 
Gars auld claes look amaist as weel's the new ; 
The father mixes a' wd' admonition due. 



stagger 
fluttering 
fire, or fire- 
place 



anxiety 

by and by 

careful 
private 



hard-earned 
wages 



inquires 



news 



makes - 
clothes 



Their master's an' their mistress's command, 
The younkers a' are warned to obey ; 
An' mind their labours wi' an eydent hand, 
An' ne'er, though out o' sight, to jauk or play : 
" An' O ! be sure to fear the Lord alway ! 
An' mind your duty duly, morn an' night ! 
Lest in temptation's path ye gang astray, 
Implore His counsel and assisting might : 
They never sought in vain that sought the Lord 
aright!" 



diligent 
dally 



THE COTTER^S SATURDAY NIGHT 103 

But hark ! a rap comes gently to the door 
Jenny, wha kens the meaning o' the same, 
Tells how a neebor lad cam' o'er the moor, 
To do some errands, and convoy her hame. 
The wily mother sees the conscious flame 
Sparkle in Jenny's e'e, and flush her cheek ; 
With heart-struck anxious care, inquires his name, 
While Jenny hafflins is afraid to speak : almost 

Weel pleased the mother hears it's nae wild, worthless 
rake. 

"V^' kindly welcolne Jenny brings him ben, 
A strappin' youth ; he taks the mother's eye ; 
Blythe Jenny sees the visit's no ill ta'en ; ceived 

The father cracks of horses, pleughs, and kye : cows 

The youngster's artless heart o'erflows wi' joy. 
But blate and laithfu', scarce can weel behave ; sheepish 

The mother, wi' a woman's wiles, can spy. 
What makes the youth sae bashfu' an' sae grave ; 
Weel pleas'd to think her bairn's respected like the 

lave. ^^^* 

O h ap py love lwhere lo ve like this is found I> 
leartfelt raptures ! bliss beyond compare ! 
I've paced much this weary, mortal round, 
And sage experience bids me this declare — 
'' If Heaven a draught of heavenly pleasure spare, 
One cordial in this melancholy vale, 
'Tis when a youthful, loving, modest pair. 
In other's arms breathe out the tender tale. 
Beneath the milk-white thorn that scents the evening 

gale." " - 

Is there, in human form, that bears a heart, 
A wretch ! a villain ! lost to love and truth ! 
That can, with studied, sly, ensnaring art, 
Betray sweet Jenny's unsuspecting youth? 
Curse on his perjur'd arts ! dissembling smooth ! 
Are honour, virtue, conscience, all exil'd? 
Is there no pity, no relenting ruth, 



104 



APPENDIX 



Points to the parents fondling o'er their child ? 
Then paints the ruined maid, and their distraction 
wild? 

But now the supper crowns their simple board, 
The halesome parritch, chief o' Scotia's food ; 
The sowpe their only hawkie does afford. 
That 'yont the hallan snugly chows her cood : 
The dame brings forth in complimental mood. 
To grace the lad, her weel-hain'd kebbuck, fell, 
An' aft he's prest, an' aft he ca's it guid ; 
The frugal wifie, garrulous, will tell. 
How" 'twas a towmond auld, sin' lint was i' the bell. 

The cheerf u' supper done, wi' serious face, 
They round the ingle form a circle wide ; 
The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace, 
The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride : 
His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside. 
His lyart haffets wearing thin an' bare ; 
Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide. 
He wales a portion with judicious care ; 
And "Let us worship God!" he says, with solemn air. 

They chant their artless notes in simple guise ; 
They tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim, 
Perhaps " Dundee's " wild, warbling measures rise. 
Or plaintive "Martyrs," worthy of the name; 
Or noble " Elgin " beets the heavenward flame, 
The sweetest far of Scotia's holy lays : 
Compar'd with these, Italian trills are tame ; 
The tickl'd ears no heartfelt raptures raise ; 
Nae unison hae they with our Creator's praise. 

The priest-like father reads the sacred page. 
How Abram was the friend of God on high ; 
Or Moses bade eternal warfare wage 
With Amalek's ungracious progeny ; 
Or how the royal bard did groaning lie 
Beneath the stroke of Heaven's avenging ire ; 



porridge 

food — cow 
porch — 
chews her 
cud 

well- 
matured 
cheese 

twelve- 
month — 
flax was in 
the flower 



hall 

grey locks 

chooses 



fans 



THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT 105 

Or Job's pathetic plaint, and wailing cry ; 
Or rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire; 
Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre. 

Perhaps the Christian volume is the theme. 
How guiltless blood for guilty man was shed ; 
How He, who bore in Heaven the second name, 
Had not on earth whereon to lay His head : 
How His first followers and servants sped ; 
The precepts sage they wrote to many a land : 
How he, who lone in Patmos banished. 
Saw in the sun a mighty angel stand ; 
And heard great Bab'lon's doom pronounced by 
Heaven's command. 

Then kneeling down, to Heaven's Eternal King, 
The saint, the father, and the husband prays : 
Hope " springs exulting on triumphant wing," 
That thus they all shall meet in future days : 
There, ever bask in uncreated rays, 
No more to sigh, or shed the bitter tear, 
Together hymning their Creator's praise. 
In such society, yet still more dear ; 
While circling time moves round in an eternal sphercc 

Compar'd with this, how poor Religion's pride. 
In all the pomp of method, and of art, 
When men display to congregations wide. 
Devotion's ev'ry grace, except the heart ! 
The Power, incens'd, the pageant will desert. 
The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole ; 
But haply, in some cottage far apart. 
May hear, well pleas'd, the language of the soul ; 
And in His Book of Life the inmates poor enrol. 

Then homeward all take off their several way ; 

The youngling cottagers retire to rest : y^ 

The parent p air their secret homage pay, ^;^y 

And proffer up to Heaven the warm request. 

That He who stills the raven's clam'rous nest, 




106 



And decks the lily fair in flow'ry pride, 
Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best, 
For them and for their little ones provide ; 
But chiefly, in their hearts with grace divinej)re^ide 



From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeui^ sprin g-s^ 
^That makes her lov'd at home, rever'd abroad : 
ly^""^^^ Erinces and lords are but the breath of 





" An honest man's the noblest work of God 
And certes, in fair virtue's heaven lyj^gad, 







ttage leaves tne 



ar Denma; "Wi^^L^^^^^ 
at is a lordling's pomp ! a cumbrous load, 
isguising oft the wretch of human kind. 
Studied in arts of h^U, in wickedness refin'd ! 



4vix./^''^^ 



f^^..^^^ 



O Scotia ! my dear, my native soil ! 
For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent! 
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil 
Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content ! 
And, O ! may Heaven their simple lives prevent 
From luxury's contagion, weak and vile ! 
Then, howe'er crowns and coronets be rent, 
A virtuous pop^ilaceinayj-ise the wh ile»^ 
And stand a wall of fire around their nmch-lov'd isle. 




r 




\>{^ Thou 1 who pour'd the pati;iotic tide 
'^ That stream'd through Wallace's undaunted 
Who dar'd to nobly stem tyrannic pride, 
Or nobly die, the second glorious part : 
(The patriot's God peculiarly thou art, 
His friend, inspirer, guardian, and reward ! 
O never, never, Scotia's realm desert ; 
But still the patriot, and the patriot bard, 
In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard 



,ed heart ; 1/ 




THE BONIE BANKS OF AYR 107 

THE BONIE BANKS OF AYR i 

Tune — '' Roslin Castle " 

The gloomy night is gath'ring fast, 
Loud roars the wild inconstant blast ; 
l^on murky cloud is foul with rain, 
I see it driving o'er the plain ; 
The hunter now has left the moor, 
The scattered coveys meet secure, 
While here I wander, prest with care. 
Along the lonely banks of Ayr. 

^ The Autumn mourns her rip'nifTg corn 
By early Winter's ravage torn ; 
Across her placid, azure sky 
She sees the scowling tempest fly : 
Chill runs my blood to hear it rave ; 
I think upon the stormy wave. 
Where many a danger I must dare. 
Far from the bonie banks of Ayr./ 

'Tis not the surging billow's roar ; 
'Tis not that fatal, deadly shore ; 
Though Death in every shape appear, 
The wretched have no more to fear : 
But round my heart the ties are bound. 
That heart transpierc'd with many a wound ; 
These bleed afresh, those ties I tear. 
To leave the bonie banks of Ayr. 

Farewell, old Coila's hills and dales ! 
Her heathy tnoors and winding vales ; 
The scenes where wretched Fancy roves. 
Pursuing past, unhappy loves ! 
Farewell, my friends ! farewell, my foes ! 
My peace with these, my love with those : — 
The bursting tears my heart declare. 
Farewell, the bonie banks of Ayr ! 

1 Composed when the poet thought of leaving Scotland and going to 
the West Indies. 



108 



APPENDIX 



A BARD'S EPITAPH 1 



Is there a whim-inspired fool, 

Owre fast for thought, owre hot for rule, 

Owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool ? 

Let him draw near; 
And owre this grassy heap sing dool, 

And drap a tear. 



too 

bashful 
submit 
tamely 

over — 
lament 



Is there a bard of rustic song 

Who, noteless, steals the crowds among, 

That weekly this area throng ? 

O, pass not by ! 
But with a frater-feeling strong, 

Here heave a sigh. 

Is there a man whose judgment clear 
Can others teach the course to steer, 
Yet runs, himself, life's mad career 

Wild as the wave ? 
Here pause — and, through the starting tear. 

Survey this grave. 

The poor inhabitant below 

Was quick to learn, and wise to know, 

And keenly felt the friendly glow. 

And softer flame. 
But thoughtless follies laid him low. 

And stain'd his name ! 

Reader, attend ! Whether thy soul 
Soars Fancy's flights beyond the pole, 
Or darkling grubs this earthly hole 

In low pursuit ; 
Know, prudent, cautious self-control 

Is Wisdom's root. 



1 This belongs to Burns 's residence at Mossgiel. 



M aif - ?^ n n ni#%.<« 



/Ml! 



AR 25 190 



